Transcript: Maximize Performance through Gaining Clarity First

Understanding the customer becomes critical and understanding what they truly value, not what you think they value, not what you wish they value, but what they really do value is important. People will talk about making a safe structure for someone to work or live in or whatever it might be. You know, it's really not about that structure. It's about what that structure enables. And that's the purpose.

Hello, I'm Brittany Campbell Turner, and this is The Constructor Podcast, episode number 49. Hello and welcome to The Constructor Podcast, the best way to build it. This podcast is dedicated to helping property owners have certainty in their decisions about their construction projects. We talk about fostering trusting relationships, help you understand how to lower risk, be under budget and on schedule, and most importantly, exceed your end user's desires. I hope you guys listen to my five-part series about blockchain in construction.

And if you don't know very much about blockchain, it can improve transparency and trust and operational efficiency. So it's really rearing its head as a game changer in the AAC industry, much less any industry that's working to adopt it. So we covered a couple topics, including blockchain in smart cities, blockchain in supply chain as it relates to material management, blockchain from the legal perspective, blockchain in BIM, and blockchain in integrated project delivery. So if you haven't listened to the series yet, go check out the five episodes starting with the first about blockchain in smart cities and how it affects policy.

You can find that at constructor.com slash EP 44. So today we're starting the first of the 19th annual Lean Construction Institute Congress Recap. In the coming weeks, we'll be covering feedback from a mix of owner-operators, designers, lean consultants, and general contractors on how they are capturing and leveraging the lean advantage. So if you weren't attending the Congress, the Congress theme was about capturing and leveraging the lean advantage. So we wanted to really get a good sense of how people are doing so.

I asked questions about what they're doing to make impacts in their organizations, in their projects, and in their overall AAC communities. I was excited that I was able to do a one-on-one interview with keynote speaker Karen Martin and talk with her about Clarity First. I was her new book that will be released in January of 2018, so that's next year. So this episode is that interview that I had with Karen Martin. So just to give you a sense about Karen herself, she helps organizations use clarity, focus, discipline, and engagement to achieve higher levels of performance of financial, operational, and cultural fronts.

She's the president of the Karen Martin Group, Inc., a global consulting firm. Karen and her team have helped organizations such as AT&T, Chevron, GlaxoSmithKline, Epson, International Monetary Fund, Lenovo, Mayo Clinic, and the United States Department of Homeland Security. She's helped them learn more effective ways to design work systems, grow market share, solve business problems, and accelerate improvement. In this interview, we talk about why organizations do not have clarity, what some of the pitfalls are of not setting a clear foundation and relying on ambiguous goals, and lastly, we talk about some of the recommendations she has for better organizational clarity.

So let's get into the interview. Welcome to the Constructor Podcast, Karen. We're happy to have you on the Constructor Podcast, where we are at the LCI Congress today in Anaheim, California. Thank you. Thank you for having me here.

It's great in the construction world. I like construction. I love it. So thank you. Yeah.

So you've previously written four books in the field of lean. You're the author of the Kaizen Event Planner, Metrics-Based Process Mapping, Value Stream Mapping, and The Outstanding Organization. You have a fifth book that's coming out, and we're going to talk a little bit about that release a little bit later in the interview, but could you tell us what that book is and how you came about writing on the topic of clarity? Yeah. Thank you.

Good question. So clarity is an interesting animal. It's seemingly simple, and people often don't even think about it. It's almost like we don't go around thinking I'm breathing air, I'm breathing air. We don't think about clarity.

And I've found over decades of doing this kind of work with businesses now that if you drill everything down to one primary root cause of organizational performance slacking and lagging and not as high as it could be, in my view, is lack of clarity. So when I wrote The Outstanding Organization, Clarity, Focus, Discipline, and Engagement were the four fundamental behaviors or conditions that organizations really need in order to have peak performance. When that book was released, clarity became the one area that I got the most emails from.

I had more organizations saying, hey, please come help us with this. And it frankly had the most emotion around it. I even had one male engineer at a client that wasn't prone to show emotion at all write me an email and say that he was in tears realizing how much the lack of clarity was dragging him personally down and his organization. And so I knew that there was a lot more to explore, and that's why I decided to devote a single subject book on it, which is Clarity First, the next book that comes out in January.

Well, so what I like about the fact that you wrote Clarity First is that you actually used lean methodologies to focus on clarity. You eliminated some of the areas, and I don't want to call them waste because it's not like the outstanding organization wasn't valued, but you focused on adjusting to something that was hugely valuable. As you actually you found that many people gave you feedback on clarity and said, wow, this is amazing, especially that engineer who emailed you saying that he was in tears. That's amazing.

So you're actually tapping in to the thing that is most important. The most fundamental. Yeah. Well, with that being said, let's move a little bit on to what clarity is all about. Why do we even need clarity?

To define clarity, it's you know, a, you know, you have clarity when things are easy to understand. So it's an ease of understanding, and then you can take appropriate action, you can make appropriate decisions, etc. And the opposite of clarity is ambiguity. And so ambiguity becomes the fog that prevents organizations and people from reaching higher levels of performance. And clarity is important because without that, we don't have enough information to make good decisions and to take appropriate action.

And so without clarity, there's a lot of wasted effort. There's a lot of frustration. There frankly are horrendous decisions that are made based on what people perceive as being facts. But they aren't the full story. And then that results in sometimes millions of dollars of excess spend.

It can sometimes result in death. The lack of clarity has a lot of tentacles and a lot of pretty high stakes outcomes, as well as just simply being a morale dragger. And to boost morale, you need to be able to operate with greater clarity because clarity feels good. It may be painful to learn the truth in some ways, but it's liberating to know it and to not be dragged down by not knowing. So the fog drags us down and clarity lifts us up, even if it's not wonderful news.

At a very, very small level can be tiny little things where people don't know in an organization who to go to to get a decision made. So they spend a lot of, you know, they spend their wheels, they spend a lot of time going around trying to figure out who to see. I mean, even silly little things like work charts. A lot of people minimize the value of a clear organization chart that's kept up to date. And they think that it's too much structure, it is too rigid, and especially organizations that think that they're matrixed, most are not.

Most organizations think that they're matrixed in art, but there are some that really are matrixed. But you can still make a matrixed organization clear on paper on who you go to for what and who you need to involve. If you want to make a decision that affects another functional area, well, who's the leader over that functional area that you need to go to to get that kind of approval and buy in in order to make change? So there's just at a simple level, just knowing who to go to for what is something we see commonly lacking.

And then there's everything from performance. What does good look like for a functional area or for division or for the whole organization? How do you know you're healthy or not healthy? Getting clear on how you measure success. That's often not clear at all.

Processes. How to do the work. That's often not clear. So a new hire comes on board and there's this very long learning curve that is incredibly frustrating because it's not crystal clear how the work should be done. And I could go on.

There's all these different, I call it the five P's, purpose, priorities, process, performance, and problem solving. Those are the five areas that the biggest offenders in organizations where there's excessive ambiguity and not nearly enough clarity. Okay, so I think that gives us a good sense of what those areas of fog are. And what I understand is that obviously impacts productivity and fulfillment of work. And that it has an impact on how well businesses do from a revenue standpoint.

Could you tell us about that? And even before we get to revenue, could we talk about how it impacts customers as well? It's fascinating to me. The more we work with organizations and ask very pointed questions, we ask a lot of questions, the more we ask questions and get vague responses, the more we understand that many, many businesses don't know their customers and they don't know what their customers value. And that's what lean fundamentally is designed to achieve while making a decent amount of margin, while building a work environment that fulfills people.

All of that goes with delivering value goal that we all have. And so understanding the customer becomes critical and understanding what they truly value, not what you think they value, not what you wish they value, but what they really do value is important. And so that's part of it. So the revenue drain can come from the huge areas of market share loss, because people need confidence that you're competent as an organization. And that's true within leadership and even frontline ranks as well.

People need confidence to know that you're competent. And if you're not competent, people aren't going to have confidence. If they don't have confidence, then they're going to go elsewhere to get their business fulfilled, whatever it is. And so market share loss is a big risk. Is there a direct cause and effect study that has been done between clarity and revenue?

No. Do I wish there was? Yes. Might I be involved with one? Hopefully.

Because I do think there's a direct cause and effect there, but we just simply haven't found the means to measure it yet. Yeah, sure. That makes a lot of sense. And now that I think that we've talked about why we need clarity and the problems associated with not having it, and the fact that it has a direct cost on how businesses actually perform, I'd like to dig into why organizations don't have clarity. Now you listed out the five P's earlier, purpose, priorities, process, performance, and problem solving.

And these sound reasonably important. But what is the mindset and value system that organizations have why they do not have clarity? I like it. You know the story, where's Waldo? Where's clarity?

Why is it not there? So there's a number of reasons why I've studied it for, actually I've studied it for a longer time than what even the outstanding organization has been out, which is five years now, because I saw it as such a common thread to lean principles, practices, and tools, and a means to give us clarity. And I found it so commonly lacking in organizations. I've been looking at clarity for quite some time. So here's what I came up with.

First of all, there's a lot of organizational noise. And so being clear about priorities helps you get rid of some of that organizational noise. When you've got a lot of noise in the environment, it's very difficult to know what matters and what you should focus on. And clarity just becomes that much more difficult to achieve when there's noise. The next thing is that there's two fundamental mindsets and value systems that are key for clarity.

And that's humility and curiosity. And curiosity is woefully lacking in many leaders and in many organizations, not through any intentionality of ours, but because it's been kind of beaten out of us. And I talk in the book about how as children, we're born very curious souls. And we ask, why mommy, why daddy, and why not, and when, and what if. And we ask all those questions.

And then we meet well-meaning parents that are impatient and tired. And they get impatient with those questions. And then we meet teachers that don't want to have to answer the questions for some reason or another. Then we meet bosses who are threatened by those kinds of questions. I've experienced all of the above there.

And so it gets tamped down. And so then you get this whole workforce of people that have been kind of smacked around as children and then young adults and been taught that clarity doesn't matter and that curiosity is bad. And then we have to reignite all of that. And it's a heavy lift for an organization. So you have to be very intentional on wanting clarity and understand that there's psychology to be had here.

You can't just cognitively say, let's get clear. We have to actually unpack all that tamping down. And then humility goes along with it. And humility, we think of humility as being just not arrogant in the way that we operate and talk. But humility is much deeper than that.

Humility is not believing that you know the answer before you really do know the answer. And many, many leaders have gotten promoted because they were star performers. And they're known for making decisions and doing. What we have to do is kind of help them unlearn that doing and get clearer on what's really going on so that they make even better decisions and can be even higher performers and understand that humility means the ability to say, I don't know, but I'm going to find out. Most leaders don't know the answer.

And they think they do when they're presented with a problem initially, proper discipline problem solving, which Lene has been great at bringing to the table, allows a leader to really truly know the facts, not what they think or wish the facts were. Yeah, I think those are very key areas. I mean, first of all, tamping down of curiosity and being stifled. I mean, people don't realize that they're yearning to be curious, you know, people like that recognition. They want to be told that when they ask questions, it makes sense to ask the questions themselves.

But in school, people raise their hands in class and ask seemingly stupid questions. And what, guess what? Peer pressure. Why did you do that? You wasted time in class and we didn't get through the material.

So yeah, that's really interesting. And then the humility aspect. People get awarded for knowing the right answer and knowing it quickly for that matter. And no one person can know all the answers either. So when you work as a team, which is very lean focused, I think that does tease out exactly what you're talking about.

Yeah. And I'm working with a CEO right now who asked a question a couple days ago that was really good. He said, you know, there's a line between being decisive as a leader and being humble and wanting to dig more deeply. So where do I find that line between needing to be decisive and move my organization ahead versus, you know, feeling like I need to take the time to really understand the problem more? And I said, you know, some of it's based on urgency.

You know, if there's something that's very, very urgent and you need to stop the bleeding, I call it, then, you know, sometimes you have to take more decisive action more quickly, but those are so rare, you know, that when you have a whole scope of problems to be solved and gaps to be closed, as I call them, you know, there's just a plethora of very non-urgent and middle urgency that require the time. And even those urgent ones that are rare, they require, you know, quick action, but then methodical problem solving immediately behind it.

So leaders just need to become more aware of their own habits and, you know, this is habit breaking that we're talking about here. And there's a lot of things, you know, in the book, I talk about mindfulness, for example, there's a lot of ways to get more aware of how you behave, how you think, being able to see how you think is so cool. Quieting the mind is a way to learn how to do that. And the only thing that has helped me be able to be aware of my own thought patterns and get out of my own way in some of these areas and to be vulnerable enough to seek clarity and be willing to hear the answer.

And really, what is developing is poor collaboration habits. I think that puts us in a better context of why organizations do not have clarity. It's just not the culture that organizations typically uplift. You know, most organizations have a culture of fear, and it's very risky to have curiosity in a culture of fear. You know, there's a lot of, again, undoing and unlearning that we work with organizations to do in order to move them ahead.

And W. Edwards Deming, the father of total quality management, that was one of his big things was we've got to remove that culture of fear and replace it with a culture of innovation and curiosity and wanting to experiment and wanting to take some risks. Many organizations aren't there yet today. So the next question that I wanted to ask you is, what can we do to get clarity? This is where lean comes in.

Lean is lean management, and I bucket them into lean principles, practices, and tools. The management practices in particular are, and process design approaches, are clarity boosting. And so when I was looking at lean, you know, there's, I've always struggled to break lean into a more simple way of understanding because it's very complex. There are a lot of pieces to lean management, and most people don't have experience with all of them, and so they think it's only one aspect, but it's a very broad management practice and approach of philosophy.

And so when you look at, for example, value stream mapping as a tool to enable conversations about future state design across many, many functions, that is about as clarity boosting as it is. So more use of value stream mapping to understand how workflows work more commonly doesn't flow across many, many operations. Value stream maps are the blueprint of an organization, and so being able to constantly look at that and get clear on how work is flowing is important. Things like visual performance boards. You want to make all problems visible.

That's the primary reason for all of this, and we need to get, you know, many more visual boards up in small work teams, larger work efforts, and companies, entire companies, about how it's performing and being more transparent about that so that you can actively seek solutions to problems instead of putting them under the rug and pretending they don't exist. They exist, whether you acknowledge them or not. They exist, and so I would much rather see organizations at least acknowledging them and then actively taking some measures to solve those problems.

Another thing would be visual management in the workplace in terms of job aids. There's all kinds of things like taping things and all of that to allow people to see quickly and easily what they should be doing and how they should be doing it. Standard work, getting clear documented standard work. All of these things are there to help us get more clear. At the strategic level, things like Hoshin-Kanri, also known as strategy deployment or policy deployment is another name for it.

You know, those kinds of approaches also are there to get clarity around the priorities of an organization, and so, you know, the list goes on and on. There's not one lean principle practice or tool that's about masking the truth. You know, it's all kind of truth telling serum. It took me a long time to see that common thread. Now that I see it, it's like, wow, you know, we've got it there.

All we have to do is use it. It's already in front of us. Organizations don't have to search for a way. We already know the way. And with Alina as well, there's a concept of eliminating organizational waste.

How does that reveal the clarity of focus? Waste to me is noise. You know, that's an organizational noise where you're spending money, you're expending resources, you're using time that you otherwise wouldn't need to spend. So this becomes a resource management effort. And the more you are able to reduce the effort that people are taking, the time that they're taking to do it, the cost of doing it, then the more you can see the real line of processes and value streams delivering value to customers.

So waste elimination becomes beneficial for the organization for obvious reasons. But the reason why it's beneficial is because it's enabling clarity. You're getting rid of all that junk, that muck that's dragging an organizational down and causing in some cases, it's organizational ADD, attention deficit disorder. And so it's a noble cause to reduce waste, but not in a vacuum. It needs to be tied to strategic direction that the organization wants to go in so that priorities don't become like a pinball machine.

We're big, big, big, let's do this, let's do that. You know, it needs to be aligned to the mission. How does an organization ensure that alignment is taking place? To me, it starts with purpose and hoshe and Conry or strategy deployment doesn't really ever get into the purpose discussion, even though it's been there all along. And Toyota, where lean comes from, certainly is very clear on their purpose.

Their purpose is to transport people safely from point A to point B. And everything that they do is about transporting people safely and easily from point A to point B that purposes there, we often have to go back to that purpose discussion with organizations before we do any kind of strategy deployment, because they focus so much on the what, what they do is not purpose, why you do it is purpose. And if you stay focused on the noun, the what, instead of the verb, why you do it and what it does for your customers, then you're never going to make the kinds of business decisions and prioritization decisions that will enable you to really get where you want to go.

So here's an example. Companies that are very clear about purpose include health care, social services, government to some extent is clear about their what their mission is and what they're there to do in terms of how it helps someone. When you get into things like construction, for example, manufacturing is another one, maybe even financial services, it gets a little murkier on what you're really doing. People will talk about making a safe structure for someone to work or live in or whatever it might be. You know, it's really not about that structure.

It's about what that structure enables. And that's the purpose. Absolutely, I would 100% agree with you on that. And that's actually something I've been really trying to get to the bottom of in some of my most recent interviews. Yet even when you're working with construction, when you're working with an owner and they have a specific purpose that they're hoping to achieve for whoever the end users is going to ultimately be whether it be their clients or their customers, it could be the people that are working in the particular space, the people who are contracted, they need to start assuming that same vision.

And that can really be a challenge. But I think that people who are working in lean teams utilizing the tools of respect, honesty, transparency, those things can help to really enable that. I think it really plays into what you're talking about. And even though you mentioned a specific organization, we need to start thinking, at least in construction of ourselves, as little mini organizations that go from project to project. And just going back to your point of curiosity, right, it's asking those questions that tease out what the real problem is in the first place, and how that is impacted by the result of whatever you're trying to achieve.

It's like you said with value stream mapping. You know exactly where it's going. And sometimes we're paying attention to the wrong thing. It's like that example with the ladder being put against the wrong wall. People spend their time climbing a ladder to success only to find that when they reach the top, it's leaning against the wrong wall, right?

We have PDCA or PDSA, Plan, Do, Study, Adjust is what I prefer. That's what Deming actually preferred. DMAIC, 8D, TBP. There are many, many problem solving models out there, OODA. And I feel like they all have shortcomings.

And I have felt this from the beginning, that the words Plan, Do, Study, Adjust, while they're more intuitive than Plan, Do, Check, Act, they're still not clear. Plan, for example, has a lot to it. So as I've been working with people for now two decades on problem sol- well two decades just within Lean on problem solving, many decades beyond that in operations management, problem solving, I discovered that people don't answer questions that are important questions because Plan doesn't really give them questions. So clear problem solving is a question based approach.

You can overlay it onto any problem solving model. And it's just getting very, very clear on the questions that need to be answered every step along the way as you're solving a problem. The other thing that we see happening is problem solving, people sometimes think about it's all about getting to a solution, but there's a lot of, again, psychology to getting to a solution that's at least sustainable. And one of them is selling people on the fact that a problem is even a problem so that we're solving the right problems and the biggest problems, not the silly problems that maybe one part of the organization is concerned about but the rest of the organization isn't and it robs resources if you're not focused on the right things.

So just even things like how do we know it's a problem? How big of a problem is it? How do we know that it's that big? And answering those kinds of questions help people get the support they need to then move forward in solving the problem and getting that support and getting people all aligned around the fact that something is even a problem is the first step and it's missing a lot in PDSA. Yeah, so the next question I'd like to ask is, well, now that we found clarity, how do we keep it?

How do we sustain that? So the self-awareness part of this is the biggest trick and it's the toughest to achieve and it but it is the thing that helps sustain it because once you become self-aware, you can't become unaware or it's not as likely, let's say that, you know, it's like once the cloud is removed from your eyes, it's hard to put the blindfold back on. The more you can get aware of when you're operating with clarity, so I have three different categories of people, clarity pursuers, clarity avoiders, and the clarity blind.

And organizations are primarily one of those three as well, but it is situational. What you want to do is move from being a clarity avoider in certain circumstances to being a clarity pursuer. And that's a clarity pursuer is both an information provider and an information recipient or consumer of information. So, you know, you want to move that needle. Self-awareness is the first thing it takes to understand that you're even avoiding in the first place or you're blind in the first place.

Hmm. So you've identified that either you're blind or you're avoiding clarity, right? Okay, so say you as an organization have identified this clear purpose and two, three years down the line, you're still understanding and, you know, focusing on that clarity in mind, but the technology or the market has shifted. What would you recommend to ensure that people or organizations are always going back to that, I guess, clear vision? I'm imagining that there's, you know, some ability to evolve, right?

How do they maintain that purpose of why? Right. So your purpose never changes. And that's the thing that's key. And that's what's missing in many organizations is they're not clear about the purpose.

So for example, let's take Apple, you know, the technology of enabling communication has changed significantly since Apple was formed. So the what changes, but the why has never changed for them. Same with Google. You know, Google wants to be, you know, the source globally of information transfer, heightened awareness and learning and knowledge as a result of that. That purpose will never change, but the means to deliver on that purpose will.

So if people are clear on purpose, you can flex based on market demands and changing technology and all these things, and people will be quick to change and quick to pivot wherever you need to do it. It's when people aren't clear that it's like this big old cruise ship trying to navigate a turn and leaders wonder why they're not achieving it's because you lack clarity and purpose that is the bond that keeps everyone moving in one direction. So I think you've laid out the entire plan for us.

Could you tell us your top recommendation to achieve clarity, whether it be personally or in an organization? This may be a tall order. It may sound like a tall order, but it actually is. If you break it into pieces, it's actually pretty darn achievable. There are three things that organizations and individuals need in order to operate with greater clarity.

First, you have to desire it. And there are plenty of people out there that don't want to have that level of clarity. So you need a leadership team, for example, that all value clarity. They desire it, they want it, they're not afraid of it, and they're going to do whatever it takes to create a culture of clarity. And then the second thing is skill.

It does take a little bit of skill to understand. If you have a vague meeting invite with a bunch of people that don't know what the purpose of the meeting is, you have to be able to recognize it. So it takes some skill. And then it takes tenacity because you have to kind of stick with it. And so to me, if you're a supervisor of a work team, you can decide, you can declare that you want to start operating with greater clarity.

And you can keep it in your sphere of influence. You can work and work and work to operate with greater clarity. And it will indeed affect in a positive way performance and the relationships of the people in the area. You can be the CEO and you can do it at an organizational level. But the first thing is to talk about it, to talk about that it's needed, why it's needed.

And then it's all in the situations as they arise. If someone, if they're saying, let's be curious, let's pursue things. And then one person says, hey, I'm wondering why we're doing it that way. And someone smacks them down, then it's not going to work. So it takes this commitment, that's the tenacity.

It takes this absolute commitment operating that way. And it starts with that conversation. And it's really about having that conversation at the right time. Right? Like you said, it's about getting clear, looking at that layer of influence that you have and really checking your messaging and your delivery approach, whether it's your client's team, board, but you have to insert it into your day to day meeting and reinforce it regularly.

Right? Providing customer value, we always think about that as us doing it to some external customer. In organizations, everyone's a customer to something. And so always going to the customer and saying, is this clear enough? Like, is my email clear enough?

Do you understand what it means? Or am I writing vague? And again, it's self-awareness and it's training. It's little by little learning that you really aren't as clear in your emails as you could be. And I really don't know why we're at this meeting.

I really don't know our purpose. I really don't know how we're performing. All those things just help little by little move that needle from avoidance or blindness to clarity pursuing the whole organization benefits. And with that, Karen, I have to thank you. This has been amazing talking about clarity.

I could really talk about this all day, but I do want to give you the opportunity to share with people where they can find more about you and where they can pre-order the book. So our website is you can either do karenmartin.com or KS, stands for Sue, KSmartin.com is the original website, but they both point there for the organization and what we do. And then the book, if you want to go direct to a link, it's clarityfirstbook.com. That lands you on the book page and then there's different links to pre-order it to Barnes & Noble, Amazon, other ones as well.

So clarityfirstbook.com and karenmartin.com. Twitter, at karenmartinopics. LinkedIn, same thing for personal and Facebook is Karen Martin Group. So facebook.com, Karen Martin Group. And Slideshare and Vimeo and YouTube, they're all the same.

And I'll post all of those in the show notes for everyone to easily find. And this has really been a pleasure talking with you. Thank you again, Karen. Thank you so much for having me here. It's been a great time talking with you.

Thank you, Brittany. Well, I hope you guys enjoyed my conversation with Karen Martin about having clarity. Let me know if you enjoyed our discussion by connecting with me on Twitter, at Brittany underscore CT or find me on LinkedIn, or you can just email me at Brittany at constructor.com. Again, for the email, that's BRITT, A-N-I-E, at constructdouble R dot com. So I specifically chose to open up the discussion about clarity first so we can understand what we should be trying to achieve as organizations in the AEC industry, no matter what perspective we have or what role we play.

We really need to have clarity of purpose personally and professionally so that we can make the greatest impact possible. So wanted to give you a little bit more context. When I was planning for the Congress and preparing questions, I had a specific vision. I would actually invite all of you to determine a vision for yourselves as you plan to listen to the next batch of episodes. So I went into doing the interviews of the Congress with great goals of finding out about tools and techniques, how people have been successful in lean.

I wanted to hear some amazing metrics and figure out what those compelling stories are of what the benefits are of utilizing lean and why they continue using it. I also wanted to give you guys the opportunity to hear about what some of the LCI Congress goals were. So we're going to get some feedback about that. Also feedback from some of the keynote speeches that were done and then also personal and professional lean journey recaps. Some of my interviewees include some lean veterans Dan Fauche, Howard Ashcraft, and Rex Miller.

What I find most interesting is that I set out this vision, this plan, this goal. I had clarity first and what I found out was the feedback I got wasn't exactly what I expected. So look forward to the 19th annual Lean Construction Institute Congress recap continuing for the next three episodes and you'll find out what I learned. Don't forget to subscribe at Constructor.com to get email updates from me. If you haven't already subscribed to the podcast, you can do so at iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and iHeartRadio.

Please leave a review to show your support and let me know you're enjoying the podcast. I look forward to talking with you guys next week.