Episode #49 is another conversation with Dr. Gwendolyn Galsworth, who you might remember from Episode #26 last year and Episode #45, which was the first part of this conversation.
In this episode, we talk about “Visual Displays,” a topic from her Shingo Award-winning book Visual Workplace, Visual Thinking: Creating Enterprise Excellence Through the Technologies of the Visual Workplace. Gwendolyn established Quality Methods International (QMI) in 1991 as a consulting, training and research firm, specializing in the Visual Workplace.
Gwen explains how her experiences in Japan shaped her thinking about supervisors as “leaders of improvement” rather than mere overseers. She outlines seven elements of leadership–including managing, leading, measuring, stabilizing, coaching, teaching, and contributing–and shows how visual displays serve as an essential tool for fulfilling those roles. Far more than charts on a wall, effective displays foster trust, create transparency, and provide the basis for real conversations across functions.
The episode also contrasts traditional computer dashboards with physical, interactive displays, arguing that the latter are more powerful in driving daily improvement and reducing fear and blame. Gwen shares stories from her consulting work in Europe and previews the Visual Workplace Summit, featuring leaders such as Don Reinertsen, Norman Bodek, and others. Listeners will come away with a deeper understanding of how visual management builds clarity, accountability, and connection–whether in factories, hospitals, or offices.
For earlier episodes, visit the main Podcast page, which includes information on how to subscribe via RSS or via Apple Podcasts.
Episode #49 Key Words and Links:
- “Leaders of improvement” – a phrase Gwen learned in Japan
- Managers of improvement — not “supervisor”
- Manege — French word, to handle, to control, to clean house, to train horses
- www.visualworkplace.com
Transcript
Introduction
Announcer:
Welcome to the Lean Blog Podcast. Visit our website at www.leanblog.org. Now, here's your host, Mark Graban.
Mark Graban:
Hi, this is Mark Graban. You're listening to episode number 49 of the Lean Blog Podcast for July 28, 2008. Our guest today is Dr. Gwendolyn Galsworth of the Visual-Lean Institute, which you can find at www.visualworkplace.com. This is part two of a recent conversation that we began in episode number 45 about visual displays in the workplace. Today we'll talk about the role of supervision and the impact that visual displays and visual management can have in all sorts of workplaces. So I hope you enjoy the second part of the discussion. As always, thanks for listening.
Supervisors as Managers of Improvement
Gwendolyn Galsworth:
I'd like to just shift now the discussion to the next ripple, which is the story about supervisors. This is something that I got from the Japanese. My first trip was in 1983 or '84. I don't even know if you were born yet, Mark.
Mark Graban:
I was in elementary school.
Gwendolyn Galsworth:
Let's not go there. When I was in Japan, around 1984-85, we went to Toyota and Toyota suppliers. It was just magnificent. Even though I had a background as a Latin teacher and I used to start hospices and help people die, somehow or other I made the transition very quickly into manufacturing. I got it, and I knew something was going on there that was magnificent. I heard this phrase repeated, which is “leaders of improvement.” They said, “Oh, we never call supervisors ‘supervisors' because they're really ‘managers of improvement.'” And it was like, “Oh my God.” In other words, your real job is to manage improvement, to make improvement happen.
That has dwelled with me for decades. It's been almost 25 years. About seven or eight years ago, I began to again look at the plight of supervisors and understand that they had the wrong job description, and so did their bosses, and that's why they were struggling.
Mark Graban:
I love that phrase, “managers of improvement.” That's great.
Gwendolyn Galsworth:
It is great. And I shifted that into becoming a “leader of improvement.” Because when I looked up the word “manage”… when I traced the etymology of “manage,” it went back to a French word called manège, M-A-N-E-G-E, and it means either to clean house or to exercise horses. If we take that etymology, it means to handle, to control, to guide, to direct, to get somebody to do what you want them to do.
So I identified seven elements for a leader of improvement.
- You're going to manage the logistics, expedite, and monitor performance.
- You're going to lead, setting and sharing company visions, values, strategies, and methods.
- You're going to measure, installing measures that actually give you a feedback loop.
- You're going to stabilize, clarifying standards and reducing abnormalities.
- You're going to coach, helping others focus and attain their own improvement vision.
- You're going to teach these methods and systems.
- And you're going to contribute, implementing improvement solutions of your own.
When this began to evolve, these seven elements of becoming a leader of improvement, I suddenly saw, “Wow, this applies to every supervisor, right on up to the CEO.” And here is where displays come in. I am mandated, with this definition of a leader of improvement, to create a visual display. I have not only a right, but I have an obligation to create a display that will help me master all of the variability and complexity. I like very much taking displays and putting them into a larger framework, so people will see that these displays aren't just there to help the supervisor, but they're part of the whole fabric of weaving a very strong leadership layer.
Mark Graban:
I think you make a great point. What you're saying is there's a distinction between top management saying, “Thou shalt track these six metrics,” and somebody dutifully updating the charts without doing anything about them. What's the point of tracking that if people aren't using that information to drive improvement? Or better yet, defining what measures they need to accomplish the goals their bosses have set. Is that a fair way of putting it?
Gwendolyn Galsworth:
Yes. And of course, it sounds very unattractive, but in actuality, it's awfully hard to get that to happen on its own. You have to keep pushing it. As compared to visual displays. I just look into the faces of a supervisor and I say, “What will make you sane? What will make you feel safe here?”
Mark Graban:
I was going to say, a lot of them might say “retirement.”
Gwendolyn Galsworth:
Maybe so. Going home right now.
Visual Displays as a Communication Network
Gwendolyn Galsworth:
Just last spring, I was at Nooteboom Trailers, this place where Toon and Frank Mulder work. We did another cycle of visual displays, this time within a Lean framework. They weren't Lean the first time, about four years ago; now they're very handsomely leaned. We did a rounding of visual displays, and purchasing, engineering, and operations were all suffering because of the shortage of steel in Europe. China is just pulling all of that raw material out, and these factories that are assembling with steel components will have 99.99% of an assembly done and be missing a part. In this case, the unit is about 80 feet long, and you have to find storage.
There was a tremendous sense of fear–palpable fear–and its partner, anger, accusation, blame, and shame in the whole organization. I said to Mark, who's taken over since Hank retired, “We have to give people as much safety as is available. Let's do visual displays. At least they can know that the part isn't coming, and at least there can be a conversation.”
And I want to add this piece: a conversation between the displays on the floor with the displays of the upstream functions, like engineering and purchasing. When you do these visual displays, you could look at them as cries for help. “Help! I don't know this. This is what I need to know,” says operations to purchasing. And purchasing says, “I hear you. I see your pain. There it is on your display. I have an echo in my department that goes upstream to the supplier.” And we are aware that this pain isn't going away, so we have to create other interventions that will actually create some stability in the organization so we're not at each other's throats.
Then you have this beautiful event in a visual environment where the functions are speaking to each other and the people who populate those functions are feeling as though they're connected, that we're all, in fact, about the same thing. This is shared pain, but we hear each other, we respect each other, we're taking action.
Mark Graban:
Yeah, I think I can picture what you're saying. I have the benefit of your book in front of me, Visual Workplace, Visual Thinking, which has so many wonderful illustrations and pictures. I definitely recommend the book.
Gwendolyn Galsworth:
Thank you. I do want to let people know about our website. It just went up about a week ago. We're very proud of it. It's visualworkplace.com.1 And if people have visual displays or if they want to have a conversation, because I'm really in the midst of writing this book, if they have displays that they want to share that they think are really odd or interesting, I would love to see them. We've got probably five or six thousand displays in our archives now because we've been collecting them for years.
The other thing that I want to say about displays is that displays are iterative, Mark. That means that you get a display that speaks the truth, and then you go back again and you make it speak a new truth or more truth. You keep building the truth, you know, you keep fine-tuning it until you get complete information at a glance.
The Visual Workplace Summit
Gwendolyn Galsworth:
We're having a Visual Workplace Summit in the fall. We're calling it a summit; that seems to be the popular word for conferences nowadays. It's all about visuality. Don Reinertsen will be there on Visual Pull Systems. Martin Hinckley will be there on poka-yoke. Someone will be doing Visual Lean Office, somebody else will be doing Visual Hospital. Because I truly believe that visual is a very powerful partner to Six Sigma and also to Lean. Oh, and Schonberger is going to be there, and Norman Bodek.
And we're giving a special award. I'm so proud of this, Mark. There's a gentleman named Don Dewar who founded Quality Digest decades ago, and he's the guy who brought quality circles to the United States, like in 1978. Because he's done a magazine and isn't a kind of mouthpiece the way you and I are, he hasn't been sufficiently celebrated. So we're going to give him a lifetime achievement award. He's 84 now, and I'm very, very pleased with that.
Mark Graban:
And where is that being held again?
Gwendolyn Galsworth:
It's going to be in Portland, Oregon, so I can sleep in my own bed. It's going to be the 18th and 19th of September. And on the 17th, there'll be a bunch of pre-conference workshops that are strictly on visual modalities.
Mark Graban:
It's exciting to hear about the summit. There are just as many, if not more, opportunities within hospitals as there are in factories for supporting the process and supporting supervisors.
Computer Dashboards vs. Visual Displays
Mark Graban:
One other popular way of displaying data is this idea of “dashboards,” which are really computer systems. The big sales pitch is that an executive can be secluded away from the process and have this visibility into all sorts of charts and data. How do you see that fitting in with the visual methodology?
Gwendolyn Galsworth:
Well, I think that those kinds of computer displays are very valuable. They are as valuable as the dashboards that we spoke about earlier. They lack a few of the dynamics that are also important for other reasons. If you want to have a snapshot, that will give you a snapshot. But what it doesn't allow, in my experience, is it doesn't allow interactivity, and it also doesn't allow for the display to be organized around the needs of the folks who are actually creating the output you see on the board.
So those displays are very important for senior managers sitting wherever they're sitting. It is a long-distance shot, and it often doesn't touch enough components of reality for you to be able to change it. It's sort of like watching a forest fire on television. You can see it, but you can't impact it. The folks who are at the value-add level, well, they're on the ground.
So I think that in our workplace, there's room for both, as long as you don't ask the computer to do what the display can do, which is to really drive down the causal chain, to actually change cause. The two go hand in hand. But if I were to say which is the more important in an environment that's trying to make the transition from traditional manufacturing to an excellent organization, I would say that interactive visual displays are. They are relevant, timely, correct, precise, complete, up-to-date, centralized, interactive, self-explaining, and perhaps the most important word there is “complete.”
Mark Graban:
I do want to thank you again for taking time out and joining us here on the podcast today.
Gwendolyn Galsworth:
It's a pleasure, really, truly. You're a great interviewer, Mark. You're doing a great service. It's wonderful. Thank you very much.
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