This article is the first in a series exploring the key insights and discussions from the recent Future of People at Work Symposium, a groundbreaking event that brought together the Lean Community to address the pressing challenges facing today’s workplace. In the first installment, we focus on the thought leadership provided by the event’s speakers, whose expertise set the stage for a deep dive into the future of work. Subsequent articles will examine the rich conversations generated by participants, capturing the collective wisdom and actionable strategies that emerged from the Symposium.
The workplace has become a less familiar and even scarier place since the pandemic ended. Managers are dealing with a lot: lingering stress, a reordering of global supply chains, a mix of multi-generational work styles, hybrid and remote work, and a sudden swerve turn toward AI-powered technology.
About 150 people managers in search of solutions gathered at the MGM Grand Detroit on July 18 and 19 to attend the inaugural Future of People at Work Symposium. Seven leading lean-focused organizations collaborated as hosts, the first time the groups offered an in-person event together:
- Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI)
- Shingo Institute
- Catalysis
- Toyota Production System Support Center (TSSC)
- GBMP Consulting Group
- Central Coast Lean
- The Ohio State University’s Center for Operational Excellence
The top takeaway from a mix of presentations by in-field experts, open discussions, and collaborative exercises was this: Tried-and-true lean principles and practices provide opportunities to better prepare people for the workplace, keep workplaces safe and human-focused, and strengthen the U.S. economy by generating jobs with good wages and potential for advancement.
Speakers also encouraged attendees to view emerging technologies as an opportunity, not a threat, and several of them demonstrated working solutions.
The event proved so powerful that plans are underway for a second workplace symposium in 2025 at the headquarters of O.C. Tanner in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Standardize to manage workplace evolution
In his opening keynote address, author Steven Spear, senior MIT lecturer and winner of five Shingo prizes, encouraged attendees to focus on three things to steer their workplaces out of the “danger zone” and into the “winning zone”: slowification, simplification and amplification. Spear covers the concepts in depth in his latest book, Wiring the Winning Organization, which he co-wrote with Gene Kim, author of The Unicorn Project.
For lean practitioners, that advice mirrors foundational principles, such as quality first (aka “go slow to go fast”); respect for humans/human-centric work planning (clarity in instruction and mistake-proofing), and problem identification and solution support (andon systems).
Spear described an example from the U.S. Navy to illustrate the value of these principles. The Navy has had nuclear power plants on board submarines since 1955. They travel underwater in adverse conditions and encounter dangerous adversaries while also producing nuclear energy. And despite being run by people roughly 26 and younger, the fleet has had no harmful accidents and has never harmed the environment.
The underlying advice: To help regain control in the workplace, use standards and practices that are human-centric and rely on mistake-proofing instead of relying on years of experience and training.
“The problem is confusion,” Spear said. “And the more we can reduce confusion for people, the more they can accomplish. Once we have a simple flow, why do we have standards? Because the standard is our best understanding of how to succeed.”
Poised for a production transformation
The pandemic upset manufacturers up and down supply chains and shed light on the downsides of off-shoring production. But even before the pandemic, changing views about the value of a strong U.S. manufacturing sector have discouraged investment in people and other capital. The good news is that foreign companies with more long-term views are investing in U.S. manufacturing, and overall manufacturing is growing. It could be a time for change.
Ben Armstrong, executive director and researcher at MIT’s Industrial Performance Center and Work of the Future initiative, said that while U.S. manufacturing is growing, we are less productive than we used to be. Some view this as O.K. if companies make products associated with economic resilience and add jobs.
But Armstrong said this is shortsighted thinking because manufacturing can contribute much more. His research shows that factories that are growing, productive and competitive can lead in creating lasting economic value because they invest in people and innovation. He described a growing New Hampshire machine tool shop with $1 billion in revenues as an example.
“It’s employee-owned and invests heavily in skills,” Armstrong said. “It has an onsite training institute to support its workers. It’s created positions and career ladders for its workers.”
Investing in people isn’t enough, though. Armstrong said to become more resilient and productive, manufacturers need to invest in improvement and innovation. The employee-owned machine tool company makes generous investments to advance existing production, as well as R&D for new products and processes.
Speaker Miles Arnone, CEO and co-founder of Re:Build Manufacturing, also believes that U.S. manufacturing has untapped potential for personal and economic benefit. He recounted a story of falling in love with the machine tool industry, founding machine tool businesses, watching the decline of U.S. manufacturing competitiveness, and then committing to help rebuild U.S. manufacturing by investing in people and technology.
Arnone trained in the Toyota Production System (TPS) and said he has baked lean into the principles and operations of Re:Build, which is a group of engineering and production companies in aerospace and defense, clean technology, health, industrial equipment, and mobility.
His talk connected how a decline in investment in U.S. manufacturing has contributed to a more disengaged and unprepared workforce. Because U.S. investors (private equity and capital markets) emphasize short-term gain over long-term gain, dollars have flowed away from U.S. plants and into overseas production and the service sector. This, in turn, has caused a proliferation of jobs with low wages and no upward mobility, and a decline in the number of skilled jobs that have good wages and career paths.
“Most people are graduating from high school and going to work in jobs like these,” Arnone said. “They’re no longer able to really participate in the American dream. You can’t buy a house and build a future for yourself and send your kids to school or have a better life for them than you had yourself. And that leads to sort of a disaffected nature or alienation from the idea of what America is about.”
By contrast are the operating principles of Re:Build:
- Support a strong industrial and engineering foundation for the health of the country economically, socially and politically.
- Demonstrate a model of industrialization that works for the U.S.
- Democracy in systems, which is expensive and takes time, but strengthens over the long term.
One of the workforce trends that is holding people back from available manufacturing jobs is a lack of preparation for hard and soft skills. Speaker Dennis Parker, Director of the Federation for Advanced Manufacturing (FAME), outlined how the FAME program is training a skills- and workplace-ready workforce as a countermeasure to this problem.
FAME is the education arm of the National Association of Manufacturers and works with 400 employers and 84 universities to train students on STEM skills and critical lean skills, such as respect for humans and constantly prioritizing safety. Parker said FAME operates as a pull system because the curriculum is created based on the needs of the participating manufacturers.
“The program introduces the concept of competitive talent development as an intentional business tool,” Parker said. “In the end, your company is literally nothing more than your people. Period. Stop. If your people are more talented than your competitors, you’ll have a business competitive advantage, a talent competitive advantage.”
Technology integration offers solutions
In addition to manufacturing, the healthcare industry was hard hit by the pandemic, and people and systems remain stressed.
Microsoft EVP and CTO Joe Petro demonstrated the power of new technologies to reduce stress and help people focus on the most important work. Petro leads Microsoft’s health and life sciences team, which focuses on improving access to care but also the clinician workplace experience.
“Happier, less-stressed clinicians equate to better health outcomes for patients and lower care costs,” Petro said before demonstrating the Nuance Dragon Ambient eXperience for Microsoft Teams.
The solution lets clinicians dictate notes directly into the Epic electronic medical record (EMR) program in the background, without having to use both applications simultaneously. The capability greatly reduces the amount of time clinicians spend documenting notes in the EMR and frees them up for more patient-centered work.
“Physicians, clinicians, nurses in particular, are suffering from massive, massive burnout,” Petro said. “This leads to poor financial performance for the institutions, but it also leads to bad experiences for us, and bad outcomes from a healthcare point of view.
And the good thing is generative AI is really going to help this. And companies like Nuance, Microsoft, and Epic are kind of leading the way.”
Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are two other emerging technologies that can be a countermeasure to problems caused by a lack of staff, skills shortages and distributed work.
Khalid Mirza, founder of the Augmented Reality Center at Oakland University in Rochester, Mich., said AR/VR is poised to transform many industries, and is expected to be a $5 trillion global market by 2030.
“We are at the start of something that is going to change how we view data and how we use data,” Mirza said.
The technology for the solutions already exists, so if you have data, you are ready to go after some off-the-shelf investments in existing hardware like AR/VR headsets. AR augments the real-world setting, such as a field engineering holding up a tablet screen to a machine to see digital instructions overlaid on the machine view. VR puts the user into a virtual setting, such as for a training simulation.
Popular use cases that Mirza demonstrated include:
- Training simulations in VR settings that are the same as your real workplace environment, which is cost effective and low risk.
- Collaborating from different physical locations as if you are sitting next to each other, not just sharing a screen.
- Interacting with objects and move them around and feel things with haptic gloves (feel touch and temperature).
- Letting people experience their work environment in an empathetic way (more human and using more human potential than a Zoom screen).
Kelly Marlow, AVP of Digital Workplace Experience, HR, Legal and Tech Marketing at Nationwide, provided a lesson in how to make sure technology is aligned to truly help people, a challenge Nationwide has leaned into.
“Our leadership cares about the workplace experience that our employees are having, and that investment is really making a difference,” Marlow said. “That’s not necessarily what’s happening across all industries.”
Marlow’s team collects data on employee digital experience using a 1-5 scoring survey and freeform commentary. They use the data to create digital journey mapping for different roles and other tools that provide insights on digital behavior and how to improve employee experience with technology planning and purchases.
Speakers encourage hope, not fear, from AI
One topic that came up repeatedly during the symposium was AI and how it is changing the workplace. Attendees expressed concerns about trusting AI, employees accepting AI as a replacement for people, and how AI might affect the development of critical thinking skills in the workplace. Those questions have yet to be answered, but speakers encouraged the managers to test AI solutions and gave examples of what they are doing.
Fabrice Bernhard, founder and CTO of Theodo and co-author of The Lean Tech Manifesto, works with companies such as Raytheon and Biogen. He spoke about the immediate impact of AI on his team’s work in software engineering. It’s been highly disruptive, he said, as benchmarks have shown that the ability of AI to fix software problems at least as well as a human would has grown 10X over six months.
Bernhard showed how he is using AI for automated scriptwriting, testing, and team communications. Although he must do some minimal rework, Bernhard said AI is drastically reducing task times. This makes people more productive, but Bernhard said AI can make value streams more productive.
In one case within a pharma value chain, for instance, his team has reduced validation lead time for a downstream team. In the previous model, files were sent to a compliance team, which would take weeks to compile a list of non-compliance problems. The Theodo team built a custom AI simulation tool that can do the same review in minutes.
Speaker Peg Pennington also encouraged attendees to test AI for problem solving such as customized training curriculums and faster creation of training materials.
She has more than a decade of experience as executive director of The Center for Operational Excellence at The Ohio State University and now is president of MoreSteam, which specializes in Lean Six Sigma e-learning and process software.
The company has created a chat AI called Hexi that sits on top of a data analysis platform, so students are doing data analysis using AI, making it easier to access and confirm that the data they are using is high quality. When MoreSteam creates such solutions, they follow lean principles to make the products safer and more human-centric.
“It is really important to monitor not just what the feedback is, but also what are students asking, right? Because there’s a signal about what they’re asking that’s telling you what they don’t understand.”
Lingering questions and new beginnings
The second day of the symposium started with a panel discussion with early lean leaders Jim Womack, renowned lean author and founder of LEI; John Shook, chairman and CEO of LEI; and Jeff Liker, author of The Toyota Way. Lisa Yerian, Chief Clinical and Operational Improvement Officer of the Cleveland Clinic, moderated the panel.
Following the panel was a collaborative exercise to plan “next steps” in the form of post-symposium experimentation.
Some of the experiment ideas included: using lean network connections to improve the development of critical thinking skills in K-12 education so that AI and automation don’t overshadow the importance of critical thinking; and establishing an “industrial tourism agency” and invest in overall marketing for job opportunities in manufacturing.
Attendees were exuberant about ideas, but they and the panelists acknowledged that they need to proceed with lean principles in mind, especially testing new proposed solutions when using evolving technologies like AI in their solutions.
“It’s up to the people in the room,” Shook said. “We started small, and our community grew organically. I see this as an opportunity to re-energize.”
