Episode 213: The Safety Gemba

Going to where the work actually happens sounds simple. So why can it be so difficult?

In this episode of Leading and Learning Through Safety, Dr. Mark French explores Gemba, the Lean management practice of going to the “actual place” to observe work, interact with employees, and understand what is really happening.

Building on previous discussions about learning design and the Analysis phase of ADDIE, Mark explains that observation is one of the most powerful ways leaders can identify gaps between procedures, data, training, and the reality employees experience every day. An informal walk through the workplace can reveal opportunities for improving safety, training, quality, productivity, and employee support.

But Gemba presents a challenge: when leaders go looking, they are probably going to find something.

That discovery creates work. Employees may need resources. A process may need improvement. Data may not reflect reality. Leaders may even discover that their own assumptions were wrong. Combined with meetings, reports, metrics, and the constant pressure of “feeding the corporate beast,” staying behind the desk can become the easier option.

Effective Gemba therefore requires more than physically visiting the workplace. It requires leaders to deliberately create time, overcome inertia, remain curious, and be willing to have their assumptions challenged.

The goal isn't simply to walk around. It is to observe and learn.

Leadership happens where the work happens—and sometimes making a meaningful difference begins with simply getting out of the chair and going to see.

Transcript

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Mark French: 0:00

This week on the podcast, we're talking about the gimba, the go and see. How do we use this to our advantage, and why is it so darn hard to get out there and get something started with that? This week on the podcast.

Unknown: 0:33

Welcome to the Leading and Learning Through Safety podcast. Your host is Dr. Mark French. Mark's passion is helping organizations motivate their teams. This podcast is focused on bringing out the best in leadership through creating strong values, learning opportunities, teamwork, and safety. Nothing is more important than protecting your people. Safety creates an environment for empathy, innovation, and empowerment. Together, we'll discover meaning and purpose through shaping our safety culture. Thanks for joining us this episode. And now, here is Dr. Mark French.

Mark French: 1:25

Welcome to the Leading and Learning Through Safety podcast. Thank you so much for having me as part of your rotation. The last couple of episodes, I've been spending some time talking about learning, which of course is like one of my favorite soapboxes of all time. I love talking about learning. I love talking about the motivation and how we evaluate and how we never have enough time to do it thoroughly, but we're always improving, always trying to find a new way or a better way of doing it. Hopefully, and just overall, how do we take time to analyze what we need? And in a previous episode, we ended with the idea that you don't really know what needs to be trained until you go and see. Go out, see what's happening, understand the real work, and then you can design a training that will at least be somewhat more meaningful because it matches the everyday work. This almost kind of ended that one episode with the idea of the gimba. So the gimba is a Japanese term meaning the actual place. It's part of a lean management process where you would do a gemba walk or a gemba observation or just do a gemba, and it means you go to the place where the work happens, the actual place, whether it be in the field, in the construction world, in the office, wherever your work is happening, you go to where it is happening and you observe. And there's a some reason, and it's true for me also. It seems like the simplest thing ever. You just go out and see, interact with the team that's working, observe what's going on, and just be there in the moment, seeing it. Be in the actual place, and yes, there's always usually forms that go along with it and paperwork, and I think sometimes that diminishes it, but it has to be tracked somehow. But there are times, there are times where we can do the informal. What I'll call this is the Mark French random term. Just the informal gimba, where I'm just wandering around looking at things. It may not seem very purposeful, but I'm taking in data. There's tons of data by just observing what is going on, saying hi to someone, how you doing today. I'm just looking around today, just watching what's going on. Let me know if you need anything. Hope you're having a great day. And observing what is happening, and being able to then take that information to tailor it to whatever else you have to do in your everyday work, because one gimba can give you enough information for quite some time. It's amazing when you sit back and observe what's going on. How many items can come up that you're thinking,"Hey, I should fix that, or I should work on that, or I should improve that, and it ties back to the analysis of whenever we're going to fix a problem, whenever we are going to have to go out and create a new learning process, or improve our learning, or change our training. It's important that we go out and see it, that we do the analysis. What are the gaps? What are not the gaps? And and what struck me as I went back into my dissertation, I was looking at examples of where people who do safety training are doing an analysis to understand how they do that training, and the one person said very clearly, being in the field, talking to the team, knowing what they're actually doing, and what that is is ultimately a gimba. It is a very lean management process, and it's amazing how safety can be a very lean process. It can lead that way to help all the other lean processes. You begin with the people. Ultimately, it's where the people meet the product. That where quality comes in, productivity comes in. All of that is where people meet the product or the service or whatever it is. So let's start getting to know our people through understand how we keep them safe, and through safety creates motivation. It's a very core motivator because without safety, how else can we become teamwork? How else can we become those who want to excel, that want to be part of the group? Anyway, that's a different topic for sure about human motivation and safety. But the gimba itself can be very safety-oriented and give way through that observation for all the other things that you need to know about as part of running an effective business. What has been interesting to me, and this is where I really want to take the podcast, and this is for me also, and I struggle, and as simple as it seems, of just getting out of my office and walking out and looking at what is going on to do the observation. There are significant barriers. It feels like sometimes to doing it, to wanting to go out and make the effort, and I think that's where it starts. Is the idea of that inertia of how do we get moving? And once we get moving, it's easy to stay moving. But how do we build up the energy to go out and see the work, and why does it feel draining to do so? Why is there? Why does it feel like there's an obstacle to getting up and going out and performing some sort of observation in the field, especially when you're sitting behind a desk, you're working, and there's so many other pressures that are happening that feel like they have to be addressed. What is what else is holding us back, tying us to a chair, or tying us to an office, or tying us to an area that's not where the work is happening now. Over the years, I am not pointing fingers at all. I'm just saying, I see it. I have been part of it. I have been right there with it. Where it seems like all the work is happening in the office, all the decisions are being made, all the policies are being created, all the training is being created in the office, while the work is happening either in the warehouse, in the manufacturing site, in the field if it's construction, like out and about, or if you're in a multi-site location, like just having to go out and walk across and look at where things are happening, or even finding the work. Okay, where is the work happening there? Okay, let's find it. Let's go look for it. It seems, and it's easy to do, to sit there and go. It's okay. We're fine. We can create it right here in the office. We don't have to be more present in the field to be able to do this effectively, and that's that's kind of a bias, and it's a false bias that it also creates false sense of security. It creates this idea that everything is fine and we're doing it well by sitting here in the office. And the more we do it, the easier it becomes, and the harder it becomes to finally get up and go out and see where the work is happening. Now, one of the reasons is that it never fails. If you are a leader and you go out to your team in the field and you start observing and talking to them, you are going to come away with some work, and I think that is the the one of the biggest. You just go, oh, I don't think I need more work. I've got plenty of work right now. So you go out, and then you're you know you're essentially by going out and doing this observation, you're. Creating more work for yourself because you're a good leader, and when you go out and observe, and your team needs something, you're going to handle it for them. You're going to help them get it. You're going to coach them through it. You're going to help them find a solution. But that's time, that's effort, that's judgment, that's your leadership, your giving, you're doing your work, and it's just more work. And because you're a leader, you know it's more work, and you know it's the work you should be doing, and it becomes the top priority. But if you're not out there and you don't see it, then it's one less thing you have to do. Let's let me go a little deeper in that as we come back to the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast,

Unknown: 10:44

humanizing the workplace. It is the leading and learning through safety podcast. What drives next level performance in your business? It's not just strategy; it's your people. And great performance starts with great leadership. At TSDA Consulting, we believe real leadership begins by creating a workplace where people feel safe, supported, and heard. TSDA Consulting is led by Dr. Mark French, a recognized leader in the workplace culture who helps organizations bridge the gap between behavioral psychology and operational safety. Learn yourself, lead others, create safety. Visit TSDA consulting.com today.

Mark French: 11:26

Welcome back to the second half of the Leading and Learning Through Safety podcast. So, right before we took a short break, I was talking about how because we're good leaders, because we know that once we go in the field, we're going to find something to improve. Our team is going to need something, and we're going to react, and we're going to take that on our shoulders, and we're going to figure out a way to get it right because it's our team. And yet, I know it's counterintuitive, but I say I put myself in this that sitting at the desk, or being looking at the data, or doing something different, other than being out there, it's it's almost self-preservation in the modern day workplace because we look at how much work is being given and how much of it is to feed the corporate beast. I once had a really insightful manager that I worked with, and he said,"You know, it's called feeding the beast. It's like the old King Kong movie. If you if you've ever seen it, so basically, ever so often, King Kong comes out of the forest hungry. There has to be a sacrifice. He eats the sacrifice, then he disappears for until the next time he's supposed to come out. Corporate entities are that way; they exist as a corporate entity, and they're not really doing the work. They're doing important things, hopefully, and yet ever so often, or very frequently, maybe it's monthly, maybe it's weekly, maybe it's whenever. They need data and they need reports. And so the angry monkey comes, the giant King Kong beast comes out of the woods. It gobbles up all the data. Sometimes roars at you because it doesn't like what it sees, and it goes back in, but if you don't do that, if you don't feed that beast, that beast will absolutely overwhelm you. Even though you may be doing the right thing by going out in the field and seeing what's going on and trying to improve it there, where it really matters, we already have enough work by feeding the beast, and so it it overwhelms us, and this is one the reason I'm really talking about this is that I want to look at the the ways that we can overcome these negative energies that hold us in the office, and how do we overcome them to get out and actually go see, so we can make meaningful differences to our team. That's ultimately where I'm trying to go. So step one is accepting the fact that we've got to feed the beast, and we have to figure out easier ways to automate to streamline that, so that we have the time and we have the energy to go out and do that. Some of the other issues that hold us back is that we have to be ready to be challenged when we go out in the field, and that can be tough because we look at data and we say, "Oh, this looks like things are really good. If I just look at the data, or not, but let's say it looks good, that it looks like things are fine, and so we have the assumption that things are fine, but if we go out into the field, if we go to the work, the place where the work is happening, we have to be ready for our assumptions to be challenged. That maybe things aren't as great as we think. They may still be good. Things may be going very well. But it may not be going as great as we think, and we have to be ready to be challenged for our team to challenge us, for the working conditions to challenge us, for a lot of things to challenge us, because I'll give a perfect

example: 15:16

is PPE on a construction site, you may be getting all the reports that people's PPE are being changed, that things are happening correctly, that people are exchanging it and getting new when they need it. You go out in the field and you start inspecting PPE, and you start throwing it away left and right because it's in terrible condition. It's one of those examples of where something is disconnecting between the data and the work that is happening, and the only way you can discover it is by getting in the field to see it. And then when your team sees that you're out there making that difference, it's a snowball. It creates a positive snowball when you're able to get out there and go. You know, I didn't see this before. I now see it. Let's make change. Let's do something different. And so, when we go out into the field, we have to be open-minded and ready to say, "This may not match what I thought it was. This may not be exactly the way I think it is, and that's a very that surprisingly, even though it can be a short process, it is a mental process that has to be initiated, and there's a lot of really interesting research about initiating and going into a thought process where you're ready to change. I mean, the whole basis of therapy and counseling, and a lot of people-oriented things, all begins with opening up and going. I am ready to take whatever comes at me, whatever data says that I see the real world, and I am going to accept it and and make change based on it. I'm opening up for the idea that there may need to be change, and that can be a very difficult thought process if you don't make the engagement, if you don't take a moment and go, okay, I am going to go do a gimba. I have all this other stuff. I've set some time aside. I'm going to go into the field, see how it is as it is to understand it, and I'm going to set my mind open that yes, I am going to have to do more work because of this. There are going to be things that have to be improved, and it's probably not going to be as perfect as I think it is. But I'm ready for that, and I'm ready to face it head-on because it's the right thing for my people, it's the right thing for the organization, and it's the right thing for me to do as a leader, it shows my commitment as a leader. It shows that I am going to be engaged, that I am going to see what it is, and then be able to develop whatever I need to develop or whatever I need to do beyond that in a way that can help my team and ultimately help the organization, but it all begins with the simple flip of the switch and that exertion of energy. You got to put the you got to put the foot on the accelerator, put some gas through it, get up, and make the effort to go out and see it exactly where it is and how it is. Observe and learn. Thanks for joining me on this episode of the Leading and Learning Through Safety podcast. And until next time, stay safe.

Unknown: 19:03

Thank you for listening to the Leading and Learning Through Safety podcast. More content is available online at www.tsdaconsulting.com. All the opinions expressed on the podcast are solely attributed to the individual and not affiliated with any business entity. This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes. It is not a substitute for proper policy, appropriate training, or legal advice. This has been the Leading and Learning Through Safety podcast.