BONUS: The Power of TWI in Transforming Supervisory Skills and Software Leadership | Hugh Alley

Summary

Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile Storytelling from the Trenches

BONUS Episode: The Power of TWI in Transforming Supervisory Skills and Software Leadership | Hugh Halley

Host: Vasco Duarte
Guest: Hugh Halley
Release Date: November 9, 2024

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Introduction

In this special bonus episode of the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast, host Vasco Duarte delves into the transformative power of the Training Within Industry (TWI) program with guest Hugh Halley. TWI, a nearly century-old program, has significantly impacted supervisory skills and leadership practices, particularly within manufacturing. This episode explores how TWI principles can be adapted to enhance Agile practices and the role of Scrum Masters in fostering effective, respectful, and high-performing teams.

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Guest Background

Hugh Halley is an industrial engineer, author, and consultant specializing in continuous improvement and supervisory skills. With extensive experience leading manufacturing firms and training over 1,000 frontline leaders, Hugh has authored two books on supervision, including "The TWI Memory Jogger." His expertise provides invaluable insights into applying traditional supervisory training to modern Agile environments.

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Origin and Purpose of TWI

Hugh Halley provides an overview of TWI's inception during the early years of World War II. As the U.S. War Manpower Commission faced the challenge of rapidly training a vast workforce for the war effort, TWI emerged as a solution to efficiently develop both technical skills and leadership capabilities.

Hugh Halley [06:11]: "TWI started right around the start of the Second World War... they had to train enough people in the technical skills and develop leaders for those additional workers."

The program addressed the urgent need to scale up industries like shipbuilding, which saw exponential workforce growth from 50,000 to 650,000 employees within three years. TWI's methodology focused on breaking down complex tasks into micro-skills and emphasizing repetition to accelerate learning.

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Key Principles of TWI

Hugh explores the foundational elements that make TWI effective, highlighting two main insights:

1. Decomposition of Skills:
   TWI dismantles complex tasks into smaller, teachable micro-skills, making it easier to train individuals quickly and effectively.

   Hugh Halley [09:11]: "You had to take things that were presumed to be an art form and break them down into their micro skills, their component elements."

2. Repetitive Practice:
   Emphasizing repetition ensures that learners can perform tasks proficiently through guided practice and continuous feedback.

   Hugh Halley [10:01]: "The insight in the job instruction module is... let's have the person try it more than once under guidance."

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Job Instruction Module

This module focuses on teaching workers how to perform tasks correctly through step-by-step instructions and repeated practice. By ensuring that employees understand each micro-skill, supervisors can enhance productivity and consistency.

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Job Relations Module

Beyond technical skills, TWI addresses the human aspect of supervision. The Job Relations Module emphasizes:

• Respect for Individuals: Treating each team member as unique and valuable.
• Open Communication: Supervisors are trained to give constructive feedback and recognize employee contributions.
• Conflict Resolution: Providing supervisors with tools to handle interpersonal issues effectively.

Hugh Halley [14:21]: "We trained the supervisors in the job relations module... respect for people and treating people as individuals."

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Impact of TWI on Supervisory Skills

Hugh shares a compelling case study where implementing TWI reduced employee turnover from 60% to 10% within four months. This dramatic improvement was attributed to supervisors adopting better communication practices and genuinely caring for their team members.

Hugh Halley [15:10]: "The supervisors actually started talking to and listening to their employees about how they were doing... they were terrified because they weren't used to talking to their employees about feedback."

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Application of TWI Principles to Software and Scrum

The conversation transitions to how TWI can inform Agile practices, particularly within Scrum teams. Key insights include:

• Collective Performance: Emphasizing team-wide responsibility over individual heroics aligns with TWI's focus on collaborative improvement.
• Effective Retrospectives: Utilizing TWI’s structured questions to enhance Scrum retrospectives, ensuring teams continuously refine their processes.

Vasco Duarte [24:55]: "One of the core aspects that we need to focus on is this collective performance."

Hugh Halley [27:35]: Introduces six questions from TWI to analyze and improve processes, which can be integrated into Scrum retrospectives for deeper insights.

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Overcoming Challenges and Misconceptions

Hugh addresses why TWI isn't more prevalent today, attributing it to:

1. Post-War Perceptions: TWI was initially targeted towards marginalized groups returning from the war, leading to its neglect in mainstream business practices.
2. Hero Culture: The overreliance on individual "heroes" in North American business contrasts with TWI's emphasis on collective improvement.

Hugh Halley [21:03]: "There's this overestimation of the hero character in North American business... we don't want heroes. We want everyone working to make things better."

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Tools and Resources

Hugh recommends resources for those interested in exploring TWI further:

• Books:

  • Becoming the Supervisor – A narrative-driven guide on developing supervisory skills.
  • The TWI Memory Jogger – A practical field guide for implementing TWI principles.

• Community and Events:

  • Annual TWI Summit in Eastern North America, though currently limited in its focus on manufacturing rather than software.

Hugh Halley [33:00]: "My Memory Jogger is more meant as a reference... The closest is the TWI summit that happens each year."

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Conclusion

Hugh Halley's insights into TWI reveal its enduring relevance and potential applications within Agile frameworks. By adopting TWI's structured approach to skill development and emphasis on respectful, effective supervision, Scrum Masters can enhance team dynamics, reduce turnover, and foster a culture of continuous improvement.

Vasco Duarte [35:50]: "Thank you very much for your generosity with your time and your knowledge."

Listeners are encouraged to explore TWI further through Hugh's recommended resources and consider how these principles can be integrated into their own Agile practices to achieve collective performance and sustainable success.

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Find Hugh Halley: Connect with Hugh on LinkedIn to learn more about his work and explore further discussions on applying TWI principles to your Scrum practices.

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Transcript

[Vasco Duart]

Hi, I'm your host, Vasco Duart. Welcome to the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast where we share tips and tricks from Scrum Masters around the world. Every day we bring you inspiring answers to important questions that all Scrum Masters face day after day. Hello everybody. Welcome to a very special bonus episode where we will be talking about a program that is almost a century old. I want to say, Hugh, pretty close. Yeah. And the program that we're going to talk about is training within industry and we're going to talk about how that relates to agile. And we have with us for this bonus episode, Hugh Halley. Hey Hugh. Welcome to the show.

[Hugh Halley]

Vasco. Delighted to be here.

[Vasco Duart]

So Hugh is an industrial engineer. He's also an author and consultant specializing in continuous improvement and supervisory skills. We'll talk a lot about that in today's episode where we try to learn something for Scrum Masters from that role of the supervisor from training within industry. He has led multiple manufacturing firms, trained over 1000 frontline leaders and authored two books on supervision. His latest book is the Twi Memory Jogger. For those of you who don't know, Memory Jogger is a very famous series of books that are small and very practical. They fit in your pocket and they help you with all the basic concepts of a specific area. That's what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk more about supervision within the context of the Training Within Industry program. So Hugh, let's start with what inspired you to study and learn about TWI or training within industry and look for insights that we could apply also in the software industry.

[Hugh Halley]

So Vasco, my started early in my career in a super toxic manufacturing world and you know, I watched supervisors screaming at their people and at their bosses. It was just horrible. And the company wound up failing. And in retrospect, what I saw is that the leaders in that company simply didn't have the skills that they needed. So fast forward in my career, a buddy of mine invited me to come and be an operations manager in his company. Five plants and warehouses and stuff like that. And I got into the company and started spending time in the plant and my spidey sense went up. I was feeling the same sense of toxic culture and I knew that we needed to fix that in a hurry. I needed to deal with the fact that my supervisors and leads didn't have the fundamental skills they needed. I went looking for ways to do that and I went to some of the standard leadership training programs and they just didn't work. There was no Change in behavior. And then I had. I got introduced to a woman, Tracy Defoe, who said, have you ever tried training within industry? And I kind of said, what's that?

[Vasco Duart]

And that's the first question that would come to mind. Right, what's that? Training within industry.

[Hugh Halley]

Yeah. But she explained it, and I said, yes, let's go for it. Because the other things I'd tried had failed. And Vasco, the results were phenomenal. I saw an almost immediate change in the culture. Productivity went up, the collaboration went up. So we think about scrum, you know, that collaboration issue is matters. And I saw two really important indicators for me that this training within industry had really made a difference. One was that when I started, we were getting zero suggestions about how to make things better, how to improve the work from employees. And by the time I left that company, they were implementing one or two changes a week that improved the work. And the other was that when I arrived, I'd heard, or I was told that people had been leaving the company because of the culture. And two years later, we started having some of those people actually move back to the company because they'd heard about the shift in the culture, that it was desirable, and we knew they were taking less money to come back. So that that experience of the power of training within industry programs really got me excited. And from there, I actually left to start my work training frontline leaders. And that's. That's how I got here.

[Vasco Duart]

So, of course, the story you just shared is very promising, and obviously anyone who's seen that kind of toxic behaviors you just described at work is going to be interested. Okay, but how did that really work? But before we dive into the details of how it works, tell us a little bit more about the story, because I think it would be critical for our audience to understand where this came from and what is behind it. Right. Because it's not an accident that it came about.

[Hugh Halley]

No, no. So Vasco TWI started right around the start of the Second World War, and the US War Manpower Commission, which, you know, they could see war was coming, and they were looking around and they identified initially two big problems. One was, how are they going to train enough people in the technical skills that they need to support the war effort? And the second question was, where are we going to get the leaders for all these additional people? And to give you an idea of the scale of this, in 1939, in the US shipbuilding industry had about 50,000 people working in it. Three years later, they had 650,000 people working in it. So you think about how many people you have to train, how fast you have to train them, and you start thinking about, how do you have leaders for those people? Like, there were lots of supervisors who had only four months more experience than the people they were leading. And many of these people. And it's not just the shipbuilding industry. It was the airplanes and tanks and all these things that nobody had been making before, like the shipbuilding people. There were lots of people working in that factory that had never seen a ship before, let alone made one. So they. It was dramatic. There was one case where they were worried about, could they get enough lens grinders, you know, all the gun sights. And in 1939, 1940, the accepted wisdom was that it took five years to train a lens grinder. And the people were looking at that, saying, if it takes that long, the war will be over and we'll have lost. You know, it's like saying it's going to take five years to train a tester. You know, just.

[Vasco Duart]

Yeah, you would run out of business before you would have the testers you would need.

[Hugh Halley]

Exactly, exactly. So they went to work on that problem, and a year later, they could train a lens grinder in five months, and a year after that, they could train a lens grinder in five weeks.

[Vasco Duart]

And what was the fundamental change of perspective that allowed for that? I'd say several orders of magnitude improvement in trending training. Pardon me, lens grinders. What was the key insight in that process?

[Hugh Halley]

The big insight was that you had. You had to take things that were presumed to be an art form and break them down into their little micro skills, their component elements. And when you did that, then you could teach them.

[Vasco Duart]

And. And this was the story of the lens grinder, right? Like, they figured out what the good lens grinders were doing. They broke it down. They analyzed it, observed and interviewed, I guess. And then through that, they broke it down into smaller. You call them micro skills that people could learn. And then, of course, you would put all of those together and then do an apprenticeship or whatever to put them in practice, Right?

[Hugh Halley]

That's right. So the other big insight from that they built into the instructional program within TWI is the whole idea that you need some repetition to learn. So most instruction that people get these days is you have, you know, one experienced person or your boss who says, oh, let me show this to you, or let me explain it to you. And they go through it once, and then they say, good on you, Vasco. Go for it. Call me if you have any trouble. But, you know, we're recording this as the Olympics are going on and you think about the practicing that the athletes do, you know, the sprinters, how many times do they practice their start? We learn through practice. You know, think about kids, they learn to walk not because they get it the first time, but because they stumble and fall and do it again and they get corrected. And so that's the insight in the job instruction module is okay, let's do some repetitions, let's explain it more than once, let's have the person try it more than once under, under guidance. And so the learner gets enough reps in the instruction process that they're highly likely to get it right when they do it.

[Vasco Duart]

Now, when it comes to the supervisory and managerial responsibilities in your work, you mentioned that managers have two primary responsibilities, achieving the mission and looking after their people. I think looking after their people these days is not so well regarded. I don't know why. I think it's going to make a comeback. I hope so. At least Agile is trying to make that. But okay, but taking that, achieving the mission, looking after their people. Can you elaborate how these responsibilities are put into practice, how they are part of the twi and also how do you see it out there in industry? When you talk to people, are they really taking care of these two key responsibilities?

[Hugh Halley]

So if you've worked on any software project at all, it's the attention to the deadlines is, you know, that, that's really evident. And, and that's the mission, right? Getting the, that work package or that particular deliverable completed for the customer. That's the mission, if you will. But certainly in my experience it's really easy to neglect the looking after your people, you know, and you hear people talk about it, oh yeah, that's just a people problem or you know, oh, he's just a whiner or whatever it is. And yet those are their telltale signals that something's not right. And so if you're an ongoing organization, you actually want to develop your people so that they're more interested in staying with you because people stay where they're challenged and where they can grow. And so, but if you don't look after your people, they'll leave. They'll just, they'll go somewhere where it's more interesting. And so from a retention perspective, it's really important. I had one client and when I started they had a 60%, a turnover rate. 60% of the people were leaving every year.

[Vasco Duart]

That's quite dramatic.

[Hugh Halley]

It is. It's horribly expensive and really hard to Deliver quality. And we trained the supervisors in the job relations module out of training within industry. And a big part of that is respect for people and treating people as individuals. And in four months, their turnover went down to 10%. Wow, that's a huge win.

[Vasco Duart]

What do you think was the biggest change? Right, like, okay, so there's the trade relations, job relations module, which has a lot of stuff, but what do you think were the key changes that happened in that particular client?

[Hugh Halley]

So I put it down to the fact that the supervisors actually started talking to and listening to their employees about how they were doing. One of the job relations module has four foundational elements to create good supervisory relationships, good relationships between the boss and the person that reports to them. And they are to let people know how they're doing, give credit where it's due, let people know about the changes that are going to affect them, and make the best use of their, of each person's abilities. So you think about the SCRUM world that's so in line with the principles of Agile and Scrum, of making best use of people's skills, letting people know how they're doing. You want to know what's the contribution? Are you on track or are you not on track? And the fact that those supervisors at this company, they had not been doing any of that. And the first time that I told them, go out tomorrow, or actually this afternoon, I said, go out this afternoon, find somebody who's doing something good and tell them. And they were terrified because they weren't used to talking to their employees about feedback. And they were ecstatic when they came back to the next session and it had gone well. Well, of course it went well. People like to know how they're doing and they like to have credit given when it's appropriate.

[Vasco Duart]

So I think it makes sense for us to explore some of these core skills for supervisors or managers, or we could call them leaders, product owners, Scrum masters in our industry. Can you discuss what are the five core skills that you believe are essential for supervisors?

[Hugh Halley]

So anyone in that kind of responsibility, they need to be able to give instruction, they need to be able to foster performance, they need to be able to improve the work methods, they need to be able to set priorities and they need to be able to listen. And if they can do those five things moderately well, they can be really effective leaders. You think about instruction, for example, you get a new team member, there are all sorts of protocols and work practices that the team will have and you need to get somebody up to speed on all that. Fairly quickly, that's instruction. And if you can't do that, well, how can you? And I guess in the world of scrum, that's probably the SCRUM Master's role. Right. Is to get those new team members on board.

[Vasco Duart]

Yes, Scrum master and the team itself. Right. Because we also talk about the team owning their processes and defining their work agreements.

[Hugh Halley]

Yep. And so you look at that as the team takes that responsibility, then you start talking about, well, how does the team handle it? If you've got one member of the team who's consistently making significant errors or is consistently late delivering their work packages, how does the team actually respond to that? And there are skills in the TWI model within job relations that give you a way to, in a fair and even handed and thoughtful way, foster performance.

[Vasco Duart]

And for me, what is really important is that the TWI process, or I would say it's a whole program that was started for a must win project. Right. A big bet, as these days companies talk about all the time. But it wasn't just a bet. It was, it was putting a lot of things on the line. So it was definitely one of those things that you need to win. You can't lose that. And I realize also how important and how challenging it was at the time. This is the beginning of the Second World War, when the US was about to come into the war before they came in. And I know also the impact of TWI over the years because a lot of the TWI people and leaders went up going to Japan helped create the highest performing and highest quality manufacturing organizations in the world, like Toyota, which I talk about a lot here. Deming himself. Deming is also a person I refer to all the time here on the podcast. Deming himself was also involved in that process. There's been such a, I would say a transformative change that TWI brought to industry. It is a little bit of a puzzle, I guess I could say, Hugh, how TWI isn't in everybody's mind, in everybody's instruction books. What's your take on that? Why aren't more people talking about and using the knowledge that has been garnered through the TWI program?

[Hugh Halley]

So I think there are two things that have contributed to that, Vasco. One of them is in the aftermath of the war, all the soldiers came home, came back to North America and TWI was treated as, oh, that's something for the women and the blacks and the non workforce people. And we know better, we're already experienced. And so it was just kind of ignored. It was driven Very much by the U.S. government. And so in the absence of that push, it was kind of ignored. The other thing is, and I think this. I'm. I'm speculating now, but there's this overestimation of the hero character in North American business. And I don't know if it's as. As widespread in the Scrum environment where, you know, you have the big guy who comes, and usually it is a guy comes in with bluster and lots of team. Right, Save the team. Yeah. If only we get the right leader, it'll be fine. And there's been this mindset or this distraction, if you will, in North America that puts that kind of lead, gives a lot of credence to that kind of leadership. And so it takes a mindset that says, actually we don't want heroes. We want everyone working to make things better. If we need a hero, then something has definitely gone wrong. And I just. I think that overwhelms a lot of North American business practices that extends into software.

[Vasco Duart]

For me, that is very worrying, of course, and I see the same in software. We very often hear on the podcast talk about the. The hero syndrome, right? Like where one developer saves the team or one team saves the company, or one project manager saves the project. And it doesn't really happen in practice like that. Of course, it may come out as one person having had an outsized influence, but in the end, everybody contributed. Right. And what this brings to my mind is this need to. To develop and maintain what I would call collective performance. And when I think about the role that we play as Scrum Masters, now, thinking about the Scrum Master role specifically, that is one of the core aspects that we need to focus on is this collective performance. We need to help the teams develop it and then help the teams maintain it. Right. And from the supervisory skills and also the, you know, the program, the training within industry program for training supervisors, what are some of the core aspects about and in support of this collective performance?

[Hugh Halley]

It's a great question, Vasco. I don't know that I'd thought about it before, but here are some examples of where it plays out in the job instruction module. One of the questions is, well, what is the way we want to teach people to do this task? And the model in the program is go out and see how people are doing it and talk to them and understand what they see as the keys, the key points of getting it done in job relations, which is around fostering performance. One of the key points, as people do, the first step is talk to the individual, get the opinions and feelings of the team. So it's built in, in the job methods program, which is around improving the way work is done. Again, the injunction is go and watch how people are doing it and then it's get ever involve others in developing the new method. And so the module itself isn't super specific about how to do that, but it's baked into the process is you got to go talk to the people doing the work.

[Vasco Duart]

And this is actually quite interesting because in Scrum we have a ceremony for that. We don't necessarily go and watch people doing the work because a lot of the work actually happens in people's brains. So it's very hard to observe. You have to do things like working out loud or pair programming or so on in order to be able to dive into those aspects. But there's a lot of things that we do, specifically the retrospective, where we try to get that mindset onto a problem, right? So instead of a manager coming in and telling people, here's what you need to do differently. What happens that the team gets together, the team discusses and figures out what they can do differently. And I know that you have, from this perspective of improving the methods, you have this set of six questions to analyze and improve methods which we could use for retrospective. Would you like to introduce that for us, Hugh?

[Hugh Halley]

Sure. Yeah. I think it could be really helpful in that reflection process within Scrum. So the questions are, what's the purpose of the step? What are you trying to get done? Where is the best place to do that? When is the best place to. Best time to do that? So where. What's the. Where in the sequence? Does it go fit? You know, should you have a task before, should it be done earlier or later? Who's the best person to do that? And so now you're looking not in terms of whether it's Hugh or Vasco, but what's the role that. That, you know, should that be done by the tester or should that be done by the database developer? And then you ask, how's the best way? So now you're looking at the very granular things of are there some ways that you can combine elements or simplify elements? And then, so what's it. And then the other question, and I should have added this one at the first, is, is it necessary? You know, is this step even needed? And so if you ask those six questions, they're a very nice little checklist, if you will, that you can ask for every element in a, in a process, every, every Box in the, in. In the. In that process diagram.

[Vasco Duart]

Absolutely. And another critical skill for us as SCRUM Masters, which is also in the training within industry, is this listening. And one of the things that you've already talked about and exemplified, because TWI is all about asking the right questions, we need to be good at listening. So looking at twi, what are the ideas, the concepts, the models that are put forward to help. Exactly. Leaders, supervisors, learn to listen to the people that they work with.

[Hugh Halley]

So it's interesting, TWI itself doesn't address that. They explicitly, the creators explicitly said we can't teach everything. The listening part, the communication part is something we're going to leave to the companies to teach their people. And so they don't explicitly address it. But I think there are some really interesting models, appreciative inquiry. And there, there's a new one. Oh, I can't remember a new book that came out that was again, looking at listening models. But it really doesn't matter which you use. What you're trying to do is understand that the, that people bring their emotional stuff from their lives into their work. And you need to listen, you need to hear that, because if you ignore it, it'll bubble up, whereas if you can acknowledge it, then they can set that emotional stuff from their life aside and focus. You know, you think about somebody who's had somebody in their life die from poison drugs, or who's going through a rough patch in their primary relationship, or who has a child that's in trouble some way, you know, that's distracting.

[Vasco Duart]

Absolutely.

[Hugh Halley]

And we can't pretend that, oh, yeah, it's just another robot coming into work. And none of that stuff affects them. It does. And that comes back to this respect for individuals that is so built in and baked into training within industry.

[Vasco Duart]

It's all about respect for individuals. And when you say that, I'm reminded that one of Toyota's guiding principle is respect for people. So it's kind of, it's gone full circle. Right. Because it went to Japan and now it's coming back from Toyota to the US through the Toyota production scene system or Lean, as many people will know about it. Okay, so before we go, there is one thing that of course we've been exploring kind of touched the tip of the iceberg of how many of these concepts could apply to the SCRUM Master role. But do you have a resource that people could get started learning more about TWI and reflecting how this might help them in their SCRUM Master role?

[Hugh Halley]

So I guess I'd point at a couple of things. One is my first book. Becoming the Supervisor is built as a story of a person learning supervisory skills, being coached by his manager. She coaches him through that process. And I know large companies that are now using that as the basis for their supervisor development. So I think that it's a useful way into the subject area. The. My. My more recent book, the Memory Jogger, is more as you describe it. It's like a field guide to doing dwi. So it's very granular and detailed. It's more meant as a reference than as something you'd read during your commute. And then there are a couple of books around that you could turn to. There's not a great community, sort of established. The closest is there's a TWI summit that happens each year and usually in eastern North America. But it certainly doesn't have much in the way of the sort of software side of things. It's very manufactured.

[Vasco Duart]

Maybe it should. Maybe it should. And whoever, whoever is out there interested, maybe they can study this further and why not apply for a talking slot at that summit and share what they've learned from the software world?

[Hugh Halley]

Yeah, it'd be an interesting addition.

[Vasco Duart]

So, Hugh, of course we could be talking about this for a long time. There's so many other things we could have explored and I'm sure people will reach out to you and talk to you about those things. So let's let them know where they can find you and know more about you and the work that you're doing.

[Hugh Halley]

The easiest way for people to find me is through LinkedIn. Vasco, I readily found Hugh Alley and you'll get me.

[Vasco Duart]

Absolutely. And we'll put the link in the show notes to make sure that people find Hugh. So don't hesitate, get in touch and ask a few follow up questions. Hugh, it's been a pleasure. Thank you very much for your generosity with your time and your knowledge.

[Hugh Halley]

It's been just a pleasure to chat about it. I always get excited about talking about this stuff. Vasco.

[Vasco Duart]

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