Maria Mentzer

Okay, let's go. My name is Maria Mentzer. Welcome to my session on "How I Wired the Winning Organization!"

Gene asked me, and you have to keep me honest, he said, "Hey, Maria, when you do your slides, make sure that you have a slide to introduce yourself, to give your background, to show your credibility. And then make sure at the end you have a help-needed slide."

And I said, "Yeah, Gene, I'll have that stuff, but I won't have the titles like that. But I'll cover it in here, so you just keep me honest. Make sure that I cover those two things."

And then we're going to have a lot more fun. I'm going to do a lot of crazy stuff. I don't know if Gene will ever have me come back here, because I think I might be going off script. But we're going to do a little bit of crime mystery combined with cooking and recipes. And we're going to talk about therapy, and we're going to talk about a little bit of European history, and some dancing in there. So we're going to have a lot of fun.

So get ready for the 25 minutes of Crazy Maria.

But really, my goal for you for these 25 minutes is, after these 25 minutes, I want you to walk away with a recipe that I have kind of honed through 20-plus years of wiring winning organizations. And I want you to walk away with the confidence that you can actually implement that recipe without having to make it your full-time job. You should be able to make this your side gig.

Just like when you pick up a recipe and you want to be able to cook that meal for dinner, you don't expect that you're going to have to be a master chef and take cooking classes to follow the recipe. So you're going to get my recipe, family recipe, I guess. Call it Auntie Maria's recipe.

I'm hoping you walk away with the confidence that you can implement it. I'm hoping, my goal is that you also walk away motivated to try it, because it's going to be just that simple and actionable that you're really going to feel like, "I have to give it a shot."

So those are my three goals. And one of the things I also want to say is, what you could gain, this could be career changing. It could be one of the most impactful things that you do in your career. So why not give it a shot, right? What do you have to lose?

This next slide I actually asked AI to help me with. I asked AI, "Hey, can you just make one of those crime mystery walls where you have a villain and you have a bunch of clues, and red threads, and pins, and stuff like that to solve the mystery?" And this is what AI came up with for me.

And I said, "I can work with this. This is perfect."

But we're not here to solve a crime mystery. But I do want to cover the mystery of why should you trust me. So that's the mystery we're going to solve, because you don't know me. I haven't written a book. I'm not Steve Spear, and I'm not Gene. I've written a thesis. No one reads it. It's a book, but I mean, it's on my bookshelf at home.

So just bear with me. We'll go through this little detective game here: why you should trust me. Why should you even listen to my advice?

Really, actually, it's really simple. It's because of that guy. It's Steve in here? I don't think he's in here. You should trust me because of Steve Spear, and he'd give you, "Yeah, you should trust Maria."

But if I were you, I probably would say, "I need a little bit more. Give me a couple more clues of why. What is it that connects you to Steve Spear?"

So we're going to go through this. Bear with me here.

The first time that I heard of Steve Spear, about 20 years ago, I was working in semiconductors. My whole career has been pretty much high-tech semiconductors. And we were implementing Lean in our semiconductor fab, and part of the Lean training was to read Steven Spear's "Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System." I'm sure you have read it. If you haven't, you should. It's a very famous HBR article that he read.

It was part of our training, and we followed it, and we were able to reduce our cycle time. This is a fully loaded factory 20 years ago. We ran them 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And we were able to take our cycle times from three months, which is pretty typical, or was typical at least back then, to three weeks. We became the fastest semiconductor fab in the world at the time.

So, winning organization, right?

That was the first time I heard of Steve.

Then the first time I met Steve was at MIT. He was my professor in our Lean class. And one of the things he gave us was this handout of this process mapping technique that was just super simple. So I call it the process mapping superpower. That's the first time I met Steve, and he was my professor. And we'll talk a lot more about that in this talk.

And then Steve became my consultant. And this was at a high-tech business unit. This is years later. The reason I love this example is because this business unit was just kind of like any company. It had all the functions, and we implemented the high-velocity capabilities that Steve writes about in this book. If you haven't read this book, this is a must-read.

And it worked across all different types of organizations. We talk about product development, software engineering, hardware engineering, finance, sales and marketing, supply chain operations, human resources, the gamut. And we were able to do that following what Steve writes about in this book. And I'll touch on that a little bit later.

One of the early wins we had there with one of our incubator teams was they took a process, used Steve's process mapping technique, mapped their process. I mean, they're just starting. This is a model line. They had never done this before, knew nothing about Lean or Six Sigma or Agile or anything. Mapped their process, identified about two handfuls' worth of problems, did their hypothesis testing, experimented, did their improvement, and they cut their process time from 10 hours to 10 minutes.

And this was affecting customers. The customers were waiting for those 10 hours, and now it took 10 minutes to go. That was just an early example.

Fast forward a few years. Now this business unit has, we spread it across a few thousand people. When we started, our customer satisfaction scores were worst in class. And at this point now, we had top customer satisfaction scores.

So I'll give you that a lot of the part of my recipe is from this experience. But at that point, COVID hit, and we were used to mapping in conference rooms with butcher paper and sticky notes.

And I call up Steve and I say, "Hey, Steve, don't you have a software company? And don't you guys have a process mapping tool? Because I've looked at Miro and Mural and Visio. It just doesn't do what I need it to do. It doesn't help me map the way that you've taught us to map."

And he said, "Sure, work with my team."

So I worked with his See to Solve team, and we started mapping using their Flow tool. So then he was my software vendor.

And then now Steve is my colleague, because now I work at See to Solve, and I get to work with all sorts of organizations to help them wire themselves to be winning organizations, just people just like you. And I feel very privileged to be able to take what I've done through my career and now help others.

So the reason I went through this little mystery-solving clue thing was just to show that I can say with utmost confidence that what Steve Spear and Gene are talking about in Wiring the Winning Organization and in these books absolutely works in practice, because I've implemented it many, many times.

And these are those experiences in my career that form that red thread of my career-best experiences.

Okay, so you go to the conference. I'm sure you've gotten a lot of really great ideas, things, books to read, things you want to kind of implement when you get home. And then we all know what happens. You slept through the airport. You're kind of slightly tired, maybe a little hungover. You get home, and then it's like family's there, whatever you've got going on, and it just hits you like a brick in the face.

And you kind of go, "Shoot, I've got to do laundry. And I get to take my kid to the baseball game, and I have thousands of emails in my inbox that I didn't read when I was at the DevOps Summit. And I just don't think I can. I see it just feels like chaos."

And the last thing I can think about is driving collective change, like a big transformation effort.

So this picture is actually from, it's called Day H. It's chaotic. It's the day in Sweden. Day H, H stands for höger, which is right in Swedish. And this is the morning after Sweden switched from driving on the left side of the road to driving on the right side of the road. They decided to do this change at 3:00 AM in the morning because most people are not driving, but this is what it looked like a few hours later on the main street in Stockholm. Chaotic.

I mean, driving change, collective change, is pretty daunting. So you probably go, "Hey, the last thing I want to do, I can't put that on my plate as well."

And I say, yes, you can, because we are not going to do it all at once. So the whole key is, it's simple if you break it down. My recipe breaks it down for you so that it becomes manageable, something that you can do as a side gig.

So are you ready? Do you want to hear the recipe?

Okay, awesome. Yes, let's go.

The first thing to do: keep it simple.

I've learned because you have to explain to people what it is that you want them to do. How do you want them to change? And you have to bring them along. And this could be maybe your CEO, your leader, or maybe you're the CEO and it needs to be your peers or your team. You're going to have to get everyone to come along on this journey eventually, right, if you're going to drive this change across everyone in your organization. So keeping it simple is key.

And what I learned through my years is simple plain English, or whatever language you speak in the country where you work, is great, because then people can't say, "I can't do that. This is just a bunch of foreign terminology that I don't understand, and it's only for car manufacturers in Japan." I've heard that many times.

So try to keep it super simple, where anyone can understand what it is that you want them to do without having to know anything about Lean, Six Sigma, Agile, DevOps.

I found for me, using Steve's book, like I said before, worked great, because in this book, and this is where I think you should use Steve and Gene's book and find the terminology that resonates for your organization. In this book, Steve breaks down the behaviors that people need to do to become a high-velocity learning organization. And he breaks it down so simple that anyone can understand it, and even I can explain it to people, right?

You have to see problems immediately. Make sure that they're visible. Flag them as soon as they happen. And then you swarm and solve them, so that you take care of it before it spreads and before it becomes an explosion. So you do it quickly. Swarm and solve those problems.

And then whatever you learn when you solve them, you spread it systemically across the organization.

And then you get leaders, this is where you guys come in, who help their teams do those first three things.

That's pretty simple. That resonated with anyone, and people can't argue with you when you're backed up by this type of research and applied research. So it's not Maria's idea. It's Steve's idea, and they listened to Steve. So that helped a lot.

Keeping it simple, and use someone else's brilliance.

Okay. The next step in the recipe is: start small, but then communicate broadly.

Starting small: pick maybe two or three incubator teams, or model lines, or pilot teams, and pick only as many as you can handhold. So this is also where you actually can decide how much time you want to invest. I mean, if you pick six pilot teams, you probably will make it a full-time job. But if you pick two, it's doable.

And you're going to handhold these teams to help them change. So select them carefully, and we're going to talk about that in the next slide.

But then communicate broadly. Have the leadership sessions. Make sure the leadership is on board, that they know. Everyone should know that you're starting small with these incubator teams, but it's going to spread eventually. And you've got to have whoever your boss's boss, CEO, needs to be on board. So that's the first person. Keep it simple. Convince them first.

Start small, and then we're going to talk about these fast followers. But after that, it's kind of rinse and repeat, and then you spread it through them.

So you can get up to about, I learned, up to about a few hundred people through the incubators. Incubators about tens of people. Fast followers up to a hundred. And then you spread to the thousands after that. And I won't have much time to talk about the thousands, but the important part is the first two steps.

Okay, so now how do you pick the right incubator team? Here are some of the things that I learned that helped me.

You've got to find a team with a leader who already gets it. Because remember, you haven't done this yet. But there are always people in the company, some supervisors, some managers, that are like, "I know what you're talking about, Maria. I've been trying to do that. I want to be part of it." Pick those. Find who those people are.

And then make sure that the team also has something that other people care about that is an issue, like a pain point. Something that not just is painful for that team, but it's painful for other people, so other people care. So that's number two.

Third thing is find a team who can do improvements in hours or days, rather than maybe weeks or months or years, because you want these fast feedback cycles. You want to get some quick wins, and you want quick feedback.

And then the last thing is make sure you have the complete team roster. So try to get the intact team, and if there are any type of experts that they work closely with, bring them along as well, because you don't want to have them all of a sudden stop because they have to go ask an expert. And then it just makes it really difficult for you to manage.

So make sure you have the whole roster. And maybe there's a few other key people, stakeholders from other teams, that also need to be brought along into your incubator team.

Right. So we've done three now. Now we're getting to the really good stuff, the secret sauce.

This is now what you're going to do with those incubator teams, or model line, model pilot lines, or whatever you want to call them. Those first few teams, you're going to handhold them through using Steve's mapping method. And Steve also used to say, and this is how you basically teach them how to simplify, solidify, and amplify.

Using Steve's mapping method, I think, was crucial for us because it's so simple. Anyone can do it.

First thing you want to do is make sure that people start putting what's in their head into words, onto paper, or in some way share it. And Steve used to call this, "put what's hidden in their brains into the physical world," because once it's in the physical world, you can kind of map it and improve it.

I call it therapy, because what happens when you do this with people is, I mean, it's like venting. They just go, "Oh, it sucks because when I do this, and then I never get this stuff on time, and it's so painful." And you kind of think, "Oh gosh, they're just complaining."

You've got to let them do that. Let them get it off. They're sharing with their teammates all the pain that they have to go through every day. So just pause and just let them vent. Think, "Maria said it's therapy. It's happening. I know what she's talking about."

And then once they've done that, you can start to structure all that information that they're putting on these sticky notes, or that they're writing down, using Steve's process mapping method. And it's really simple.

And this is actually a copy of the handout he gives to us at MIT when we take his class. The right-side picture there, this one.

And you basically just map the activities, what's being done, what's being handed off between activities, like baton passes, as Steve always says. It's the baton passes of information or the things that are being handed off. And then you also map any of the methods that people use to do these activities. And then you sequence them out through who is doing them and over time.

It's really that simple. Once you do that, all these breaking points start to become apparent, the stuff that people were venting about. These are those red storm clouds. You map that too.

So that's kind of the secret sauce of Steve's mapping.

Now I'm going to give you the next slide. This is probably the one that you want to copy. This is your practice session blueprint.

You've already done, we already covered this: you picked a team, you picked the process, you're mapping the process, you identified the breakpoints on the map. You're brainstorming now. Start to brainstorm on improvements and experiments. You have the team prioritize them. If there's a lot of them, you can just do simple impact-effort matrix or some other way to prioritize them.

Start to implement these improvements and experiments. Update your map. Make sure that it's not a one-time thing. Keep updating that thing with the new improvements, because now you can share it. Remember the third capability that I just told you is sharing. Spread it to the people who can use it.

So once you have it all in the map, that's a way for you to share it. Do a map walk. Bring in the managers, leaders, stakeholders, anyone who needs to know. And then you just rinse and repeat those steps until you've addressed all the breakpoints.

And this is the practice sessions. This is what those model line teams get to practice over and over again until it becomes this part of how they address issues that pop up in their work.

And I've seen it work. It does work.

Okay, next.

Now you have picked your incubator team, or your model line, or your pilot. You have communicated broadly, so people kind of know that these teams are working. They're doing something fun with you. You have practice sessions that you repeat with them so they get to learn.

Usually by this time, you're going to have some fast followers approaching you and say, "Hey, this is kind of cool, the stuff that you guys are doing. I really think my team could benefit from it."

When those people start coming to you, you've got to be ready, because you've got to nurture them, just like those little cute hands are nurturing that little plant there. This is your chance, because these fast followers are what's going to help you get from the tens of people to the hundreds of people.

So make sure that you prepare some education materials. Again, keep it simple, but have material ready in whatever way your organization communicates: PowerPoint, or white papers, or brown bag learning sessions. You could go into staff meetings. Be ready. When they say, "Hey, can you come to my staff on Monday?" you're like, "Yes, I'm ready. I'm ready. I'm there."

Then make sure that you have some time or space for these fast follower teams to come and practice with you. Maybe it's office hours that you set up for them, like free. Anyone can come in and map.

Well, if you're going to do that, you better have a few other people to help you. So train some coaches, some other people that can handhold these fast followers. By this time, you've probably already picked out who would be a good coach, because you have these incubator teams that have already been starting to do.

So think about who can be a good coach to facilitate some of these other teams.

And then, of course, make sure you celebrate and have fun. Celebrate those quick wins, and that brings more people in, because everyone wants to have fun and get to do this type of rewarding work, I found.

Okay, but talking about fast followers, there is actually an expert, Derek Sivers. And we're going to watch a video that really tells you all you need to know about the importance of fast followers.

If you've learned a lot about leadership and making a movement, then let's watch a movement happen, start to finish, in under three minutes and dissect some lessons.

First, of course, a leader needs the guts to stand alone and look ridiculous. But what he's doing is so simple, it's almost instructional. This is key. You must be easy to follow.

Now here comes the first follower with a crucial role. He publicly shows everyone else how to follow. Notice how the leader embraces him as an equal. So it's not about the leader anymore. It's about them, plural.

Notice how he's calling to his friends to join in. It takes guts to be a first follower. You stand out. You brave ridicule yourself. Being a first follower is an underappreciated form of leadership.

The first follower transforms a lone nut into a leader. If the leader is the flint, the first follower is the spark that really makes the fire.

Now here's the second follower. This is a turning point. It's proof the first has done well. Now it's not a lone nut, and it's not two nuts. Three is a crowd, and a crowd is news.

A movement must be public. Make sure outsiders see more than just the leader. Everyone needs to see the followers, because new followers emulate followers, not the leader.

Now here come two more people, then three more immediately. Now we've got momentum. This is the tipping point. And now we have a movement.

As more people jump in, it's no longer risky. If they were on the fence before, there's no reason not to join in now. They won't stand out, they won't be ridiculed, and they will be part of the in crowd if they hurry.

And over the next minute, you'll see the rest who prefer to stay part of the crowd, because eventually they'd be ridiculed for not joining.

And ladies and gentlemen, that is how a movement is made.

There you have it. This is why I love it. That never gets old, by the way. And I have been called a lone nut many times, and I say it's great. And if anyone calls you the lone nut, it means that you've succeeded.

So here's my help-needed slide, because we're almost at the end. I have one minute, and I still have one more video to show you.

My help needed is, please try my recipe and let me know how it goes. And add your own flavors to it. It's not meant to be, this isn't rocket science, this stuff. This isn't something that I invented. I mean, this is stuff that a lot of people do every day, but I picked the best stuff that's worked really well for me.

I want to hear how it works for you, and that's my help needed from you.

And remember, too, we're not doing the transformation as a Day H, one day everyone changes at once. You can do this because we're breaking it down into bite-sized chunks.

Okay, I promised I was going to have a testimonial video. This is from the general manager of the business unit that I was talking about, which then got bought, that got the best customer satisfaction scores. So we're going to play that real quick.

The cool thing with high velocity was that the team members were directly involved in fixing the pain points that were impactful to them. And yes, we gained efficiency and predictability, along with strong customer satisfaction scores. But the hours we saved were usually the unplanned work that disrupted team members' days and, many times, evenings and weekends. So their job satisfaction increased along with the efficiency.

Getting started required the breadth and credibility from Steven, as well as the implementation knowledge, drive, and passion from Maria. We couldn't have got off the ground that way.

And I didn't write that for Rob. He wrote it himself and read what he wrote. I just want to make sure you know that.

So that's it. I would love to make sure that, don't hesitate to call me or Steve if you need help getting off the ground or you want to talk more. There are slides with many more words. So just feel free to look me up on LinkedIn or contact me. We can chat afterwards.

I want to hear how it's going. I can help you, or just cheer you on, because you will be that successful.

Thank you so much.