{"id":12512,"date":"2019-02-01T11:48:42","date_gmt":"2019-02-01T16:48:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.resourcepro.com\/insurance-innovation-strategy-gembawalk\/"},"modified":"2024-07-15T10:35:43","modified_gmt":"2024-07-15T14:35:43","slug":"insurance-innovation-strategy-gembawalk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.resourcepro.com\/blog\/insurance-innovation-strategy-gembawalk\/","title":{"rendered":"Talk the Talk, Walk the Gemba Walk"},"content":{"rendered":"

Matt\u00a0Bruno is the Founder and Chief Operating Officer of ReSource Pro. Matt began his career helping develop new insurance products for retail agents, and saw an opportunity to develop solutions that would cater to the pressing needs of insurance operations. With that, ReSource Pro was born.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

Get in the Trenches<\/strong><\/h2>\n

I have a question for managers: Do you know where innovation and creativity live in your organization? From my experience, amazing ideas are already thriving in the insurance industry, and they\u2019re happening on the frontlines, not in the C-suite.<\/p>\n

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“Amazing ideas are already thriving in the insurance industry, and they\u2019re happening on the frontlines.”<\/h4>\n<\/blockquote>\n

We as business leaders can get so removed from what\u2019s happening on the ground because we\u2019re too focused on the 10,000-foot stuff: creating strategic goals, establishing metrics across the organization, achieving financial projections. While this top-down thinking enables growth, you need to balance it out with insights from the frontlines. Think about it like a seesaw. You need to make contact with the ground before you push off to an aerial view.<\/p>\n

Gemba-huh?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

I\u2019ve found the right balance of top-down and ground-up perspectives by practicing the gemba walk<\/a><\/u><\/em>.<\/p>\n

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Gemba walk (with a hard G like \u201cgum\u201d) comes from the Japanese word genba:<\/em>\u00a0the place where work happens. Leaders at Toyota regularly walk the factory floor<\/a><\/u>, observing, asking questions, joking with employees. Business leaders around the world recognized the value of the gemba walk practice\u00a0for identifying new opportunities or fine-tuning processes.<\/p>\n

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\u201cWhen the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right.\u201d – Jeff Bezos.<\/h4>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Gemba walks also encourage an engaged leadership. Jeff Bezos of Amazon famously reads emails from customers to get a grip on what\u2019s really happening inside his company. He explained why in a 2018 CNBC interview<\/a><\/u>:<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have tons of metrics…the thing I have noticed is that when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. You do need the data, but then you need to check that data with your intuition and your instincts.\u201d<\/p>\n

What I Found<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Every time I travel for work, whether it\u2019s China, India or the US, I make it a point to meet with as many frontline folks as I can. Getting into the weeds with ReSource Pro employees\u2014without any bias or project in mind\u2014allows me to be open to new questions and ideas for innovation. At its best, a gemba walk allows you to disrupt yourself.<\/p>\n

I recently did one of my walks while in Jinan, China, and I stumbled across a team who came up with a smart strategy that could have larger implications for how we operate. (And in case you haven\u2019t noticed, we at ReSource Pro love<\/em> optimizing operations<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

The team had made some tweaks to their new hire training. First, they created training videos for each subtask, shaving eight hours<\/em> off the training time. But even more exciting was how they introduced a new mindset to onboarding, one where the trainee gained ownership over their training, rather than feeling the trainer did. As a result, the new hires produced higher quality work in their first week on the job.<\/p>\n

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This smart adjustment to process could improve the effectiveness of the whole company. If I hadn\u2019t walked around and asked, I never would have known.<\/p>\n

How to Gemba Walk<\/strong><\/h2>\n

What could you find on your own gemba walk? Follow a few guidelines and you\u2019ll be gemba walking like a pro<\/p>\n