Creating a Culture That Learns From Mistakes: Keith Ingels

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My guest for Episode #62 is Keith Ingels, the “TPS Manager” (Toyota Production System Manager) at The Raymond Corporation, a Toyota Industries Company. Learn more about the “Raymond Lean Management System., which is based on TPS. We had a longer conversation about this on my Lean podcast series, if you want to check that out.

In today's episode, Keith and host Mark Graban talk about one of his “favorite mistakes,” misunderstanding what the common Lean /TPS method called 5S really was really about. How did he make the “mistake of bad assumption” in the course of that work? Why was that mistake repeated, and how could it have been avoided? Why was it a mistake to blame people for being messy?

One key lesson was about how can we help others “discover the need” for an improvement or a method instead of “forcing” them to do it?

Keith also discusses how they work to create a culture where it's OK to talk about mistakes, so we can learn about them — that's the key theme of this entire podcast series!

The Raymond Corporation also offers a free “quick tips” series on improvement, if you want to check that out.

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Automated Transcript (Likely Contains Mistakes)

Mark Graban (0s):
Episode 62, Keith Ingels, The Raymond Corporation.

Keith Ingels (5s):
I was working at Toyota at the time. Initially I got to make this mistake a couple of times actually…

Mark Graban (14s):
I'm Mark Graban. This is My Favorite Mistake. In this podcast, you'll hear business leaders and other really interesting people talking about their favorite mistakes because we all make mistakes, but what matters is learning from our mistakes instead of repeating them over and over again. So this is the place for honest reflection and conversation, personal growth and professional success. Visit our website at myfavoritemistakepodcast.com. For show notes, links, and more. Go to MarkGraban.com/mistake62, please subscribe, rate, and review. And now on with the show, our guest today is Keith Ingels.

Mark Graban (56s):
He is with a company called Raymond Corporation. He is a TPS manager – now for those who are aficionados of the movie office space, this is not that TPS, it means Toyota Production System. So we'll have a chance to explore some of that today, but first off, Keith, thank you for being a guest here on the podcast.

Keith Ingels (1m 16s):
Thank you, Mark. Appreciate the opportunity to be here.

Mark Graban (1m 19s):
So before we talk about your favorite mistake and mistakes and corporate culture, it might be helpful for the audience for you to give a little bit introduction about Raymond, where you fit within the corporate family tree and why Toyota Production System is relevant to that.

Keith Ingels (1m 37s):
Sure. No, that's a great question, Mark. So Toyota has the ownership of Raymond Corporation today. Raymond's been around for many years and actually has that big impact in material handling. They actually patented the pallet, you know, so put a patent on the first narrow aisle equipment for, for narrow space warehousing. And about 20 years ago, Toyota acquired Raymond. So Raymond was very fertile soil for innovation and quality and blending with Toyotas thinking of Toyota Production System. This is a way to kind of speed up that continuous improvement process. So Raymond was really fertile soil for that, that, that thinking and that culture to take root.

Keith Ingels (2m 19s):
And so we took the Toyota Production System. We adapted our factory and later we've been working throughout our network of distribution and dealers, our solution and support centers to embrace that same philosophy. And it's, it's, it's yielded a lot of success for us.

Mark Graban (2m 36s):
Yeah. And we've got a longer conversation that Keith and I did in a podcast series of mine called Lean Blog Interviews, where we really take a real deep dive into the Toyota Production System and the work that they're doing at Raymond and how that's all transferrable to other settings. So I'll make sure there's a link to that discussion in the show notes for those who want to take that, that dive. That was a really good conversation that we had about, about that. But since this is my favorite mistake, you know, Keith, I'll go ahead and throw it right back to you. Thinking back to your career and the work you've done. What is your favorite mistake?

Keith Ingels (3m 15s):
Well, one of the big ones I made and kind of inspire me from our last conversation. I tell this story a lot. I was working at Toyota at the time. Initially I got to make this mistake a couple of times actually, but the first time the biggest was I had some continuous improvement knowledge, but I'd never been exposed to 5S. And 5S is a system, you know, that a lot of people hear about and I got taught a 5S for the first time and very excited about it. I got it as sift sort sweep, standardize, and sustain. There's different ways to teach it, but I got very excited and the instruction I thought, Oh, this is great. This is housekeeping. An organization we're going to clean the place up. Totally makes sense.

Keith Ingels (3m 56s):
Very excited. I could go back to our service team and our sharp service team. We have large shops in our facilities where we bring in forklifts for service, big overhauls and mass work, heavy work. And our shop was a mess. It was not, it was not clean. It's like, let's go apply 5S in the shop. So we taught 5S to the crew, they go, Oh yeah, I'm cleaning this place up will be great. So we got together. We took a week. And at the end of every day for several hours, we scrubbed, we cleaned, we have four scrubbers. We– elbow grease and cleaners. And man, we, we, we cleaned it. And we thought we got rid of a lot of stuff cause we kept emptying trash cans. and thought, Oh, this is great. Now, Mark, this might surprise you.

Keith Ingels (4m 36s):
But because we all worked in the shop together as a team, we all knew where everything went, went and belonged. So we, we didn't need any visual support. We were good. So we didn't put any visuals in place. Cause we all knew. We all knew where everything went.

Mark Graban (4m 52s):
No need to mark, for example, where tools or equipment would go as people might often do.

Keith Ingels (4m 58s):
Yeah, we didn't, we didn't need to do that. It wasn't necessarily waste of time and effort. So we had this well in hand boy, that shop was clean and we were happy. So over the next few weeks, Mark, a couple of things. We started to learn. One, we weren't the only people going in the shop, there were parts people coming in or a field, tourist, people, sales people, all kinds of people coming to the shop. They didn't know where anything went and they kept putting stuff and borrowing stuff and moving it. And they put in wrong place. That was frustrating. The other thing we did, we realized we were busy. A lot of times was a good, we're busy. And I would walk out through the shop and talk to the team. Hey, we're starting to get messy again.

Keith Ingels (5m 39s):
And I, and I got this, this response, well, we're busy today, but we're going to catch up tomorrow. We'll catch up tomorrow. Oh, that sounded reasonable to me for the next about a month. It sounded reasonable. So now we're like two months pass Mark. I go walk into the shop and I'm looking around, like, I can't tell we'd cleaned anything. This is not good. So we're trying to get, deliver a good customer service here. And we can't find tools and things. We got to fix this. All right. Let's get to get back together as a team. What do we have to do? Ah, you know, when we didn't Mark anything or put any visual support. Yeah. I remember him talking about home location. What's that? Oh, okay. So we did a smart thing, which was painter's tape and marker.

Keith Ingels (6m 21s):
And we started putting positions in. We didn't get too fancy at first. Cause we didn't really know what we were doing. So we had a learning curve. We started marking things. The first thing that, that I observed, we learned as a team was if people borrowed something that weren't familiar with the shop, if they know where it goes, they'll put it back where they see it goes. Right? So I realized we–people weren't, they what we call “disrespecting the area.” They weren't disrespecting the area because they were trying to mess up our workspace. They were disrespecting it inadvertently because they didn't know where anything went and we hadn't showed them. So we did that. We also start putting more cleaning equipment around and we also added a 5s Friday just to clean up.

Keith Ingels (7m 3s):
Now I know that's not the way to do 5S to build, but to build the habit, we would take an extra half hour plan every Friday, for sure. So we were only getting at most, a week behind, before we'd start to make an impact or return. We also did another smart thing that was sort of planned, but it had a bigger impact than I I realized at the time was we had a service technician training roster that showed all the experience and all the special training, every service tech had all techs are trained in the core equipment, but their specialty equipment, odd stuff that we don't work on all the time and not everybody's trained on it.

Keith Ingels (7m 43s):
So, but we had that visual up. And if you needed to know who is trained on something, you can go out and look at that and go, Whoa, and you know who to ask for help or support. So that turned out pretty well. So we started sustaining and then we started realizing this is going in the right direction. So that was pretty good at learning this, this 5s stuff's maybe a little more than housekeeping and it starts to Dawn on me. Yeah. So I move the clock ahead a few years and a Raymond organization. I go into a shop facility and say, well, go ahead and walk our shop, give us some feedback. Tell us what you think. So Mark, I walked through the shop and I'm looking around, I'm going, man. This looks like my shop. When I was at Toyota.

Keith Ingels (8m 23s):
It's not great. There's stuff everywhere. It's chaos. And I talk to the management team and said, how would you like to clean this area? It turns out that was a hot button for some of the managers. And someone were saying, Hey yeah, our field techs are really bad about coming in and it's a mess and they leave it a mess. I'm like, Whoa, Whoa. I had enough experience at this point, at least to say we haven't set a standard or expectation. So think about this. They're coming into a messy shop. They do the work and they leave it a mess. Cause that's what they came into. There was nothing telling them that that's not okay. Right. So if you walk in sight unseen, it's a mess and that's okay.

Keith Ingels (9m 4s):
So crew said, all right, that all makes sense. So, so that's a group and it was a big group and they decide, well, let's get everybody together for a week. Like this sounds familiar. It's like deja, but let's get everybody together for a week. We're a clean up the whole shop. Right. So I'm raising my hand. Like I don't think that's going to work. Oh yeah. Yeah. That'll be great. That'll be great. I don't think we'll just, it's not my experience. Right. So sure enough. We clean up the whole shop Mark. Guess what we didn't do again? Oh, visuals, where do the tools go? No visuals, well, everybody cleaned it up. So it's good.

Crosstalk (9m 38s):
We all know the mindset of our, we all know we all work.

Keith Ingels (9m 46s):
Exactly. So we cleaned it up and sure enough, it was the same stuff all over we're we're, we're don't have the visual support. People are going through the shop. They're messing up and sliding back again. But at least this time I could coach and start saying, all right, we're going to fix small areas, small areas and make visuals and start to turn it around. And then when the techs got involved, we learned their workspaces important to them and they, they needed to lay it out themselves. So they needed some autonomy and they needed visual support. At first there was a lot of pushback because they would say, I don't need visuals. I know where my tool goes. Okay. Do you ever alone that tool out or?

Keith Ingels (10m 28s):
Sure. Okay. Do people try to bring it back avid? They always put it back in the wrong space. Hey, we can help you fix that. We had gotten a Mark. My tools. Yeah. Something simple. Cardboard outlines, right? Something simple. Quick, not expensive, not, not time-consuming. So we started doing that and little by little, we started weaving in this concept of visuals and sustainment. And then as we keep doing this, it gets better. And it starts to catch in the shop and people realized they liked being able to walk over and find what they need. And they kind of like having a clean shop. And then the last piece of my learning to this, to this discussion came into, into focus for me.

Keith Ingels (11m 10s):
I often talk about this process. It's like looking through a set of binoculars and you kind of focus it in a picture is kind of blurry, but it gets sharper and sharper and sharper. And this was a moment where my, my vision sharpened. We had some new techs come in. Now at this point, the shop's pretty clean and it's got visual support. We had a couple new texts come in. All the tools they need are visualized. All the supplies they need are visualized. Here's a truck that's broken. They come in with a technical background, but they had no specific Raymond training, no specific Raymond skills here, go fix a forklift. I don't, I don't know how yet I haven't been trained yet. Oh. So this is where that concept we talked about last time, workplace readiness.

Keith Ingels (11m 54s):
So we gravitate towards get the tools and supplies in the area, right? So this is the first time it dawns on me. Workplace readiness really means the knowledge, skills, and experience of the people because no matter how great I set those tools up and no matter how I've got all those supplies ready. If I put someone in that doesn't know what to do and how to use those things, they cannot get that repair completed. So I'm like, Oh, this is, this is fascinating. So then it occurred to me for the first time. 5s is not housekeeping. It starts as housekeeping, but it's really about workplace readiness.

Mark Graban (12m 32s):
It may look like housekeeping

Keith Ingels (12m 35s):
Does it. You get that clean area and you get those before and after. And it's, Oh, it's pretty disorganized, but why don't we have it clean? And why do we have an organized, it's about executing for the customer, a better experience because we're trying to get to, to deliver things on time, defect free. And the way we do that is have the tools and the supplies, but also the knowledge, skills, and experience of our people. So that's the first time. And it really dawned on me that this was this foundation of the system. When you talk about, this is a system that comes together, the foundation, that system is a ready workplace, right? And the visuals are part of it and the cleaner organization's part of it. But the bigger piece is your people.

Keith Ingels (13m 15s):
And in know why it's clean and organized. Can you just tell them to clean up, guess what, Mark, I get a lot of pushback on that. They don't want him to clean up, but once they realize cleaning up helps make their work easier, right? That's that's the magic of the fifth test, the sustained piece, right? If people know this stuff works, they'll do it. And then it becomes cultural. And when it's cultural, it's sustained until it's cultural, you're going to fight with it. So, so I spent a lot of time and effort cleaning up shops. And if anybody has a big area and they say, well, I'm going to start my continuous improvement and I'm going to, I'm going to do a big cleanup. Don't do that. I mean, you can, and then maybe it's, if it's good and learning, then it's value at time, but I can tell you from experience, it's not going to work.

Mark Graban (14m 2s):
So there's a lot. So thank you for that. I mean, it's really kind of rich story. I think there's a lot to unpack. I mean, I took some notes there. I think different types of mistakes. So one, I think is you summarize at the end, there's a mistake of misunderstanding. What a business concept is about. And the, in this case, it's about, you know, five asks as part of the Toyota Production System. It could be other new things that are adopted in a workplace. Sometimes we, we misunderstand and then we learn through experience. So my, so my follow-up question for you, Keith is, you know, you're talking about repeating that mistake. You know, people learning that there is value in marking where tools go, is that a, is that a quote unquote mistake?

Mark Graban (14m 49s):
Is that a learning that each and every team had to through on its own for them to really embrace this? Was it really? You almost framed it as a mistake? Was it, was it a mistake or is that necessary learning?

Keith Ingels (15m 3s):
Well, that's a great question, Mark. And, and this is where, you know, I continue my learning journey as well in this all the time, you know, as you and you and I both know it's never ending. And one of the things I've found is one day I found myself coaching. We coach on take waste out of the process, right? So one day I was watching another trainer give the, and we had an exercise in front of some people and the trainer was giving the answer to the people and I stopped the trainer. I said, Hey, you're, you're giving them the answer. And they said, yeah, but they're not getting it. I said, yes. And I heard them. And that never had crossed my mind that I'd realized this. I said, yes, but if the struggle adds value, it's not waste because we call waste “non-value add.”

Keith Ingels (15m 49s):
Right. But if the struggle adds value in the form of I've learned, it's not waste by definition. It's not waste. So I think you bring up a great point. We, this is kind of like learning to ride a bicycle. I can show you your PowerPoints. I can ride the bicycle around for somebody else. But until you get on it yourself, you don't get it. You don't get it. A lot of the systems the same, the same way in my experience, you know, I can tell people, Oh yeah, I'm clean, organized place will make your easier. Oh yeah, that makes sense. Okay. I don't, I'll push back on that, but I get pushed back on the effort. The other thing is, they'll go bananas with visuals. You know, they'll go from no visuals to, you know, visualize everything outlined where the stapler on your desk is.

Keith Ingels (16m 33s):
If you're the only one using that stapler, you don't, you don't need that. You know, I know where that goes. If you open your drawer and there's, there's pins in a, you know, a little slot in a way in there, I maybe don't need to know that's the pin slot. Cause it's, it's rather obvious. So, so yeah, there's, there's always learning with it. But workplace readiness is, is, is what we're really trying to get to.

Mark Graban (16m 54s):
And in, in your story, you also talked about maybe we can talk more generally about what I heard you describe as the mistake of blaming individuals for what might be a systemic problem. We said, well, you know, they're being messy, they're being disrespectful. But as I heard you say, you know, the structures hadn't been put in place for them to be able to respect, you know, I think of like a parking lot example when there are lines painted, generally speaking, people will park between the lines. Now, if we had a parking lot that was completely unpainted, it might be easy to come out and be judgmental of like, well, look at that, that driver, they're a jerk. They parked too far away from the other cars, but without lines, how would they really know?

Mark Graban (17m 39s):
Right.

Keith Ingels (17m 40s):
Yes. Yeah. That's a great point. Parking lot is a great example because it's one of those standards we see and haven't, we all complained about that person either gets to, or over the line. And I could there, and I moved over a few engines, right. So there becomes that and hopefully positive peer pressure, but you're right. It's another piece of that culture is, is allowing people to learn from mistakes. And that's sometimes difficult because it's like that trainer, you know, I, I've got to give them the answer. They're not getting it. They they've got to work through it. And if it doesn't come to them through their own conclusion, it won't stay. And if they do it wrong, they're going to remember it.

Keith Ingels (18m 22s):
You know, you and I, I think agree that mistakes are great teachers. Mistakes are like, Oh, I did that wrong. Now it sticks if I happen to get it right the first time I might've just gotten lucky, I might not have learn nearly as much.

Mark Graban (18m 36s):
Yeah. And I mean, one of the themes of the podcast series here in general is, you know, we, we, we all make mistakes. Hopefully we're learning from them. And that requires at some point a cycle of personal reflection or a coach or somebody prompting us to think about how things went and did it go the way we expected, if not, what do we learn from that? And how do we adjust? So can you talk a little bit more about that culture either at Toyota or within Raymond Corporation, as part of the, you know, the Toyota family tree, how do you create a culture where it's okay to talk openly about mistakes and to reflect and to make sure that we're learning from them instead of hiding and covering up the mistakes.

Mark Graban (19m 22s):
So then it ends up just getting repeated.

Keith Ingels (19m 25s):
Well, that's a great question, Mark. And, and to start off first, I'll say it's a lot of work, but it's a lot of work. That's well worth it. If you can get people to open up and, and I've had this conversation with a lot of trainers and coaches over the years, my best guess is we're taught even from young to hide mistakes. Cause we get blamed. We get blamed for them. If you found a mistake or you must be the one that made the mistake, not necessarily. So we have this process of unlearning and we teach that mistakes are positive. In fact, sometimes in some areas of the business, we refer to them as treasures just to get people, to embrace finding them and bringing them out because ultimately we can't fix a problem that we cannot find.

Keith Ingels (20m 6s):
If we can't find that problem, we sure can't fix it. And as well, that sounds obvious. It's, it's not because people don't want to bring it to attention because they had bad experience bringing problems to light, right? So you have to reinforce and you have to have a lot of buy-in from your leadership. That mistakes are okay. And that's a positive thing, you know, in service business, as an example, you know, we focus on what's broken. And so it tends to be a negative focus because that's our value add, right? We fix the broken. So we're always looking at the broken, you know, so it gives, can give a negative bent. These concepts apply to any kind of business. So let's talk about workplace readiness.

Keith Ingels (20m 47s):
It doesn't matter what you do. If you're, if you're a dentist, if you're a chef, it doesn't matter. Whatever your customer needs. Having that workplace ready is going to help you. Now the details and particulars of a workplace, including the knowledge, skills, and experience of the person is going to change from, from service product. But the general concepts really important. So the culture becomes the driving piece. It's important to serve my customer. How do I do that better and starting to remove mistakes and problems from that customer experience. It takes a lot of work and effort and companies that learn to do it well, you know, it's like they just skyrocket past competitors.

Keith Ingels (21m 27s):
So is it worth it? I'd say it is.

Mark Graban (21m 31s):
So it seems like, you know, there are different categories of some of these mistakes. There are mistakes of understanding or misunderstanding and mistakes of bad assumptions. Like you mentioned earlier, the assumption of, well, we all know what our tools and supplies are and we all know where they go. That was discovered to be a bad assumption and there was learning and improvement that came from it. And then, you know, the, that, you know, the other thing that stands out, just kind of try and summarize and repeat back what you were saying, this idea of working through it on their own. Like, I, I would kind of agree that maybe that's not a mistake that that's a necessary process.

Mark Graban (22m 15s):
It's the difference between, you know, giving a fish versus teaching somebody how to fish and learning to fish, not just by looking at a PowerPoint slide or a video on fishing that, that working through it on their own may, may very well be necessary or as you put it value, add, it makes me think of the Toyota-ism of go slow to go fast, or maybe a make-up a variation… Sometimes going slower means you have better sustainment and long run. You're more effective. Is that fair to say

Keith Ingels (22m 53s):
It? It is. And, and there's a lot of things that kind of go into that. So, so when you're rushed to do a quick for repair of something, a lot of times you're, you're attacking a symptom and not the root cause, right? So, so you'll put a bandage or something. You're like, Oh, that's good enough, but you haven't really considered the problem deeply enough. And it turns out you didn't, you didn't resolve it. You know, a pro problem well-defined as a problem, you know, half solved. So we tend to, we tend to work in a really quick pace. So it becomes counterintuitive that slowing down is better when we teach plan, do check act, or, you know, we talked a little bit about that last time, but when we teach that more planning helps reduce the overall time because your, your, your, your execution smoother, your you're checking your act or your adjustment time is shorter.

Keith Ingels (23m 47s):
So it, but planning doesn't always feel like doing. And so we want to rush in to do, and we don't have a really good plan yet. So it takes a deliberate effort to be able to, to engage that culture and that thinking, and it takes some practice. You got to build it into a habit.

Mark Graban (24m 3s):
Sure. So that's a great point. And, you know, to, to wrap up a little bit key, if you talk about helping others and, you know, the Raymond Corporation and you and others, there are helping others by making resources available, free resources that others can learn from. Tell us a little bit about that and to the, to the audience, we'll make sure we have links to these resources in the show notes and the, the webpage for this episode. But Keith, can you talk about some of the things that you have that, that others can go and learn from?

Keith Ingels (24m 33s):
Absolutely. So a lot of our material and continuous improvement, we do white papers and we do various published, works that we put out there and available. And, and a lot of this, this comes from learning internally first, not so much helping customers, but it evolves into being able to help customers and talk to them. And things like one of the things we talked about, we have a lot of automated solutions and automated solutions are great, but we actually talk about optimized before you automate. And we want you to look at your processes before you start throwing equipment solutions at it. So you get the right solution. And it's that, it's that slow down piece that you're talking about. We have solutions that will speed things up, but if the process is making a lot of defects, we just sped up your defect rate and you're going to have a bad experience.

Keith Ingels (25m 20s):
So we try to put things out there that we've learned and we've done in our network. It's been learning for us because we we've adopted the Toyota Production System. We weren't, we weren't born into it like a lot of Toyota companies. So while we were fertile soil, for that to grow that culture of innovation was there. It helped us be more structured and a more methodical about it and help speed that process up to your point, by slowing down and being more deliberate. So we've put a lot of resources out there and, and a lot of times we can be a coach and we're willing to share experience with, with certainly with our customers of where we've struggled and what we've learned. And we're trying to put more and more white paper material and publish works out there to share because it's, it's a journey that's fun to take, and we want other people to take it with us, cause that makes healthy companies, and we want to deal with healthy companies too, right?

Keith Ingels (26m 13s):
We all want to be good and successful.

Mark Graban (26m 17s):
Well, thank you. Thank you for that. And, and again, you know, the quick tip series and other white papers and resources, I'll make sure those are available. So again, our guest has been Keith Ingels from The Raymond Corporation. He is the, of the TPS manager. And again, this might be new to some, the Toyota Production System as being part of what Keith has been talking about embracing and building there at Raymond. So Keith, thank you so much for, for sharing, you know, your story and your reflections really appreciate it.

Keith Ingels (26m 48s):
Thank you Mark. I enjoyed it again.

Mark Graban (26m 50s):
I want to thank our guest, Keith Ingels for being here. I want to also thank the Raymond Corporation for making Keith available to share his insights and stories and advice with us for show notes, links, and more again, you can go to Markgraban.com/mistake62. And I hope this podcast inspires you to reflect on your own mistakes, how you can learn from them or turn them into a positive I've had listeners tell me they've started being more open and honest about mistakes and their work. And they're trying to create a workplace culture where it's safe to speak up about problems, cause that leads to more improvement and better business results.

Mark Graban (27m 31s):
If you have feedback or a story to share, you can email me myfavoritemistakepodcast@gmail.com. And again, our website is myfavoritemistakepodcast.com

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