I ran into Stuart MacDonald, the magician from yesterday in several sessions today. I love when keynotes at a conference show their passion by learning from fellow practitioners. I bought his book, so it also worked on that level.

Morning Keynote of “Achieving Operational Excellence with Passion and Creativity” by Kaplan Mobray

As a facilitator I always approve of walking into a session with a name tag, file cards, paper, and crayons. It warms my heart.

Career coaches and motivational speakers are a tough one for me as I rarely connect with them as a conference speaker. Mr. Mobray had a high energy level, but what I really enjoyed was him using various facilitation techniques (graphic drawing) as a way to focus on his simple points, such as “pass it on” or “evolve” or “progress over persecution.”

“Steering Towards Zero Issues” by Franco Seravalli

Starts with the dilemma of poor quality and a high level overview of the case study at an automobile parts supplier in Costa Rica.

Though his case study covered their path root cause analysis and gap analysis and then went to improvement strategy.

• People – Trust our people
• Containment
• Correction/Prevention

People was the most important.

Step by step process to create a quality culture and sell change.

Focus on people and talked about human error and human performance.

• Awareness – create a sense of pride and empathy with the customer. Transparency and candor and making the quality issues public
• Commitment – Public displays of support. Talk and listen. Management walking-the-walk
• Empowerment – Trust your people, decision-making authority
• Accountability – interesting point about cultural differences (for example Spanish and Portuguese do not have this word)
• Recognition

Containment – focused on stop the bleeding and close the circle. Containment is fairly high level and felt very industry specific in his details.

Corrective Actions – laid out the typical deviation to CAPA to effectiveness review path. Covered 8D, talking about need to add risk analysis/management and the place of effectiveness reviews.

Covers risk and PFMEAs.

Again, not an intermediate discussion. We need better criteria for ranking a session. I would have gone to this even if it was marked basic as the speaker is a member of the Team and Workplace Excellence Forum, but I worry for other participants.

“See One, Do One, Go Do One” by Karissa Craig

Karissa laid out a journey to develop, trial, implement, evaluate, and refine their approach through a case study.

Brings a good qualification approach to Lean with “See One” and “Do One” are classroom learning and the “Go Do One” is application.

Talked about the resistance and the need for accountability for application. A “want to” and not a “have to”

Demonstrated the A3 as rubric for the “Go Do One”. Offered some good discussion of how firefighter cultures (which healthcare) and how you need to build the right culture to do problem and root cause and not jump to solutions.

Gave a nice 8-week (with added 1-week pre, 1-week post) schedule for training and doing.

For training focused on basic problem solving, talked about avoiding perfectionism and set reasonable expectations. Karissa described a great sounding training program. This three hour class seemed very well put together.

Had an interesting share on how training led people to realize that problem solving was harder than they used to think and impacted employee engagement. This led to a sponsor training so sponsors understood how to support teams.

“Run with scissors” about how transformation involves risk and the ways to deal with it.

Rest of the Day

I spent the afternoon networking and connecting and conducting some ASQ Team and Workplace Excellence Forum business and didn’t attend any of the afternoon sessions. I was ambivalent about the afternoon keynote speaker/piano player.