Intro: You're listening to Behind the Ops presented by Tulip Madi: Russ, how do you feel about the rain? Russ: The rain? Madi: Yeah, like are you like one of those people that could live in Seattle because you just like gloomy weather? Russ: I could live in Seattle, but it wouldn't be because I liked gloomy weather. It'd be because I tolerated gloomy. It rains more where I do live in Virginia than it does in Seattle. It's just the, the rain we get is lots of rain sometimes, whereas Seattle gets a little bit of rain lots of times. Madi: I've heard that you can tell a local in Seattle, and I'm curious if this is true in the Somerville of the DC metro area, if you can tell a local based on how much rain gear they're wearing. Because I've heard in Seattle it's like you have a zip and know like basically you're gonna get wet. It's part of living in Seattle. But if you are a tourist in Seattle, you got your umbrella and you got the heavy boots and the big coat, and you're like desperately trying to stay dry. Russ: I'm deeply against umbrellas, but weirdly pro, staying dry. Madi: Okay. Why against umbrellas? Russ: Because I'm the right height where everybody else's umbrella, the pointy tips of the umbrella are like right at eye level. Madi: Okay, so it's hazardous. Russ: You might not understand. Madi: No, not quite that tall. I'm like generally anti rain clothing. I bought my first raincoat a few months ago and I will know it's raining and I will need to leave the the house to get to my car in the rain, and I am consistently choosing to, instead of wearing my rain boots and my raincoat, wear my converse and the jacket that I wanted to wear. Because it's so annoying to wear that clothing. Russ: I, I am super pro rain boots. I don't have rain boots, I have waterproof boots, and I am very strongly in favor of putting those on. Why are you, why are you against this clothing? Madi: I have consistently, when wearing that clothing, in Boston still gotten wet and all wet Converse is like annoying, but you deal like a little squelchy. Water in your rain boots and like water on your head and under a plastic coat while walking in the rain is the absolute worst feeling like I would rather wear normal clothes, and be wet and change when I get home than wear rain clothes still get wet, and be extremely uncomfortable covered in plastic. Russ: So you have a psychological fix to this quandary, which is just deal. Madi: Yeah, deal with it. Be uncomfortable and being a little uncomfortable, you know? Russ: Oh, that's, that's where the metaphor starts. I'm uncomfortable all the time. But it's not because of rain . Madi: I think this is like true for a lot of things. Like I think one of the things that can block people from doing new stuff is how uncomfortable it is to try and fail or like try and it be okay, but not that good, when you're first doing it. Russ: Yeah. Having it not be that good is a, is a real source of fear. But in, in actuality, if you've thought about the worst that can happen, this isn't my quote, this is a quote from a important executive that I heard once. If you've, and I didn't hear it directly to me, "what's the worst that could happen? If you've accepted that, don't worry about it." Madi: Okay, so with Manufacturing, things go wrong, right? Russ: Yeah, all the time. It never, things never stop going wrong somewhere in Manufacturing. Right now, something is failing somewhere in Manufacturing. Madi: but I feel like there's this scramble to make sure there's never a space for failure. Russ: That's right. Everybody wants to have nothing at all go wrong, but something is always going wrong. It's a real disconnect. Madi: I think in, and I'm forgetting the name of this article, but one of the, the members of the labs team at Tulip shared this interesting article about how really complex systems, they're like built to support failure because things are failing all the time and so you like account for like the failure and can adapt to it and that makes the whole system stronger. I think like, I think airplanes and air travel might be one. Russ: Resilience. So you have to build a resilience system as opposed to a set of systems that won't. Airplanes are all almost broken all of the time. Madi: Which is its own, its own level of, of terrifying. But how do you get folks who are operating in complex systems where the cost of failure is really high to like get more comfortable being uncomfortable and accounting for those changes? Just like knowing risk. Russ: Two step plan, maybe one of the steps is a two part step. Two part plan though, is setting realistic expectations and not, not sticking to delusions about how well things can go. So this is, this is, instead of thinking about the objective ideal, you're, you're basically thinking about it in terms of risk and probabilities, right? And this is, Also something that's done in Manufacturing all the time. If I draw a picture of a hole and I say, Madi, you need to drill this hole. It is not the, the job of drawing the hole is not done until I've toleranced the hole, meaning I have told you in a drawing that you can consume, here's how much slop you have in the hole. Because there has to be a margin for error. And if I haven't communicated to you the margin for error, You don't have enough information to actually make the thing that I've requested of you. So the, the principle of managing risk and putting in, you know, these buffers is basically universal across Manufacturing. So that's step one is be realistic. Then step two is better information. So it's related to the first step. If you have the information that goes from the place that it needs to be to the place that somebody needs that as context for what they're working on, not too much because that's a waste of waste of energy to over collect information or overshare information. But just enough to where, you know, between step one and step two, we know it's not gonna fall down. Step two and step three, we know it's not gonna fall down. And then some amount of context two, it's two directional context. It's not just what's the context of why is Madi drilling this hole? But it's, why is Madi drilling the hole, cause what's the final part look like? And also like you need to know that as the person drilling the hole sometimes. And also other parts of the system need to understand, oh, the hole is gonna be drilled by Madi ,but it's gonna be painted by Russ. You know, those types of things. And being able, being able to sort of quickly get to the information cheaply makes it much easier to assign the information to the right places. So it, it's all about just, you know, process visibility and process, you know, cataloging and the data collection and transport piece can't be unwieldy and hyper expensive because then nobody will bother to do it. Madi: I feel like there's like a connection here with inability to move forward and also like the aversion to hacking. Russ: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Madi: Oh yeah. You wanna say more? Russ: Yeah. Well, yeah, I, I'm averse to trying a thing that I think isn't gonna work unless I have absolute certainty that the thing that isn't gonna work is gonna be, you know, like, it's gonna be fine anyway. I don't look at myself as a hacker because I feel like that's disrespectful to people that are good at programming software, but I hack on things. Sure. I'll do that. I'll say I do that. Madi: I'll say like early in my marketing career, there was this whole movement on like, marketing hackers and growth hacking. And it always made me feel really itchy as like someone who is not against trying new things, but when you try a new thing, you need to have like a hypothesis of what you're doing and how you're gonna measure success in order to learn from it. Like there's some structure, right? Like scientific method of hacking. Yes. That I think some folks just like approach willy-nilly and I think good, colloquially applied hacking is where you're trying to achieve something and you're like taking a stab at it, learning from it and iterating on it. Like that is the type of hacking that I'm happy to, to support in different settings, including I think in Manufacturing operations. Russ: I feel like there's a dial inside my mind whenever I take on a project that is hacky, whether that's software or life hacks or hardware. Or plumbing, like whatever it is. I feel like this dial is going back and forth between, is what I want here the thing that is the output of this hack job that I'm about to undertake, is the thing that I want learning, or is the thing that I want some balance of learning and the product. So a lot of times, you know, if I wanna hack together, we saw this, I saw this professionally a lot. People were talking about build or buy software systems for their, for their plants, and it's all well and good to say that you can hack together a system for your plant because you, you know, you have a guy who programs and he could, he could build this. Okay, fine. But do you have all of the, you know, contextual background of how to build and support a full blown piece of enterprise software for, for a facility? Maybe, maybe you do, or maybe that's an acceptable risk to you. But also lots of companies sell that and have gone through 1,010 endless iterations that you don't have to go through. Yeah. So taking a hacker attitude where you're stubborn, you're like, I'm gonna do this because I can, as opposed to what's the fitment to purpose. I, I think that's a pitfall, but the flip side of it is, I'm gonna do this because I'm gonna learn something and nobody's, nobody knows my process as well as I do. Therefore, it's important to us to do this in-house and build up and evaluate our own skill set. That's a completely different mentality that it leads to the same output, which is we're gonna hack together a system, but The level of satisfaction and the level of successes can be completely different because in one case, you know that part of it is for learning and dog fooding your own product, and the goal was not to have best in class software, the goal was to, you know, have pushed the limit of what you're capable of. Madi: And I think in, in the example that you gave there, like progress itself becomes more of a habit. So you like are reinforcing in what you're doing, this idea of like continuous improvement and learning and, and making stuff work. Russ: Yeah. And being uncomfortable make, make, being uncomfortable a habit. Go walk in the rain . Madi: Sometimes you're gonna get wet. Russ: See you next time. Madi: See you next time. Outro: Behind the Ops is brought to you by Tulip. Connect the people, machines, devices, and systems used in your production and logistics processes with our frontline operations platform. Visit Tulip.Co to learn more. This show is produced by Jasmine Chan and edited by Thom Obarski. If you enjoyed listening, support the show by leaving us a quick rating or review. It really helps. If you have feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us at behingtheops@tulip.co