Recorded Webinar | Continuous Improvement | Lean ManagementI
In this special KaiNexus webinar, Karen Martin -- internationally recognized consultant, speaker, founder of TKMG Academy, and author of Clarity First, The Outstanding Organization, Value Stream Mapping, and Metrics-Based Process Mapping -- answered audience questions drawn from her decades of experience helping leaders simplify complexity, improve performance, and design better systems for delivering value.
This was not a typical webinar. Attendees asked their most pressing questions about Lean, value stream thinking, leadership clarity, organizational design, and continuous improvement -- and Karen answered them directly.
Topics covered include why organizations still struggle with clarity despite adopting Lean tools, how to prevent "automating waste," what to do when leadership loses enthusiasm for the journey, how to tell whether a mapped process failed in design or implementation, and much more.
Whether you're leading improvement efforts, coaching teams, or working to make systems more effective and humane, this session offers practical insight from one of the most respected voices in the field.
Scroll down for audio recording, transcript, and more.
Strategy deployment is the starting point for organizational clarity. If leaders haven't agreed on priorities, everything downstream is chaos -- competing resources, unclear roles, and scattered effort.
A simple grid -- decisions or roles across the top, people down the side -- can resolve most clarity problems around decision rights. It's not hard to build. The hard part is getting people to agree they want to do it.
When leadership loses enthusiasm for Lean, treat it as a problem to solve, not a verdict. Have frank one-on-one conversations. Find out why they're skeptical. They may have had a bad experience with something that was called Lean but wasn't.
A process has to earn the right to be automated. Automating waste just makes the waste move faster. Wait until a process is stable, consistent, and well-understood before bringing in automation or AI.
The front lines deliver value to customers. The more leaders internalize that the customer is paying for frontline work, the better their decisions will be about where to cut and where to invest.
A leader's job is first and foremost to develop their people so they can meet organizational goals. That's the sequence -- you can't skip people development and expect results.
Star performers promoted into leadership roles often stay hooked on being the expert. Without deliberate coaching, they'll never switch to the work of developing others. That's an organizational failure, not a personal one.
When a mapped process isn't being followed, the most common causes are that the wrong people were involved in the mapping (or no one was involved), or that no one is minding the value stream after the map is done. Assign a value stream owner and watch the KPIs.
The CI team's purpose should be teaching and coaching, not doing improvements for people. Whether centralized or decentralized matters less than whether the team is building capability or creating a crutch.
The X-Matrix confuses more leaders than it helps. A linearized version in a spreadsheet contains the same information and lets people focus on the plan instead of the format. And any strategy deployment plan that isn't actively managed will produce no results.
When you walk a manufacturing floor, the physical environment tells you almost everything. Cleanliness, order, and attention to the workspace almost always correlate with process discipline and performance. Karen has never seen an exception.
To influence leadership without top-down sponsorship, find the highest-level person who does support improvement and help them sell across their peer group. Don't be afraid to ask for conversations with senior leaders, and come prepared to show why it works -- not just assert that it does.
Gemba theater dies when psychological safety is real. Leaders must demonstrate through behavior -- no punishment, no eye rolls -- that seeing reality is the expectation. If you want honest gemba walks, you have to make honesty safe.
When people resist improvement, find their pain. If there's no pain, ask whether it's the right improvement to prioritize. If the pain is at an organizational level they can't see, help them see it. Resistance usually melts when people understand what's at stake.
Mark Graban: Welcome to today's webinar. It is "Ask the Expert," and that expert joining us today is Karen Martin. I'm Mark Graban, a Senior Advisor to KaiNexus, and I'm really thrilled to have Karen here. Let me tell you a little bit about her if you are not familiar with her books and her work.
Karen has spent decades helping organizations -- from small businesses to Fortune 100 companies, from local government agencies to some of the largest healthcare systems in the country -- cut through complexity and actually perform better. Not through hype or heroics, but through clear thinking, discipline, process, and real leadership development.
Karen is a two-time Shingo Award winner. She's the author of books including Clarity First, The Outstanding Organization, Value Stream Mapping, and Metrics-Based Process Mapping.
Karen is one of the most in-demand voices on operational excellence anywhere in the world. And what I respect most about Karen's work is that she doesn't just diagnose problems -- she helps build capability for organizations to solve them on their own. That's a harder thing to do, and she's really good at it.
There were a lot of questions submitted in advance. We're going to start with those, but you can submit questions using the Q&A button, and we will try to work those in.
Karen, thank you again for being here. How are you today?
Karen Martin: I'm well, thank you. Thank you for having me. I always love these Q&A type of arrangements, so thank you.
Karen Martin: Hi everyone. Thank you so much for joining us. We are open to whatever questions you might have, as long as it's somewhat around operational excellence and improvement.
I feel like there's so much untapped potential still out there, which is great for all of us that do this work -- there's job security in that. I think it's really important to always be thinking with a bit of a psychology hat on and really listening and getting to the essence of what could be holding people back or holding the organization back. And clarity is often at the core of it.
As a facilitator, one of my big tips is: invite the elephant in the room out. Invite resistance or skepticism to be verbalized. It's a lot easier when you know what you're dealing with to figure out how to counter that and address it.
Mark Graban: The first question comes in from Tammy. She asks: Many organizations adopt Lean tools but still struggle with clarity around priorities, roles, and decision rights. What are the most common leadership behaviors that unintentionally create that lack of clarity, and what's the first discipline leaders should adopt to correct it?
Karen Martin: That's a good one. From a priority perspective, for sure: strategy deployment, also known as policy deployment, also known as Hoshin Kanri. Getting leadership to agree on what the key priorities are is the key to not having a bunch of chaos, resources bumping into each other and competing for resources.
Having senior leaders agree to that and go through the formal process of strategy deployment is a great place to start from a priority perspective.
On the role clarification and decision-making side, many of you probably know what a skills matrix looks like, where you have skills across the horizontal axis and people or departments on the vertical axis. You can use that same grid format to have decisions across the top and people down the left side. Or you can have roles across the top. Clarifying who does what and who you should go to for what, who makes decisions -- all of that is super helpful, and it's actually not that hard to do.
If you just get people to agree that they want to do that, it's not hard to actually get the grid done, roll it out, and it's very helpful.
Mark Graban: As a follow-up, do you have leaders think about a matrix of leadership skills?
Karen Martin: Yeah, from a development perspective, absolutely. You can have buckets of different things across the top. In our Leader Standard Work course through the Academy, there are certain actions and activities that leaders need to be able to do on a regular basis. First, they have to have the capability and skill set. So that's one thing you can classify. But then you can also classify how often they're doing it and whether they're sticking to their plan. It's just a simple matrix with either filled-in circles for percentages or Xs. It doesn't have to be complex.
Mark Graban: Simplicity helps with clarity, right?
Karen Martin: It does. It really does.
Mark Graban: We have another question here from Waltraud. In a consulting project, we found senior leadership had lost enthusiasm for the Lean journey. Some functions dropped their activities while others still believe in it. The lean leader wants to revitalize the effort. What would you advise to create new momentum and get senior leadership back on board? And I'm guessing this lean leader role is somebody in that unenviable middle who's been assigned.
Karen Martin: Back to direct communication and getting clarity. When we're going into organizations as consultants, the full leadership team is rarely a hundred percent gung-ho about doing an engagement and moving forward on a Lean journey. There's usually a champion or two, and then there are some skeptics, and you have to find out why they're skeptics.
So conversations -- sometimes one-on-ones -- asking, "What was your experience previously? What happened or didn't happen that should have happened? Why are you skeptical about this?" Just allow people to speak freely and create a safe environment for them to answer honestly.
It's better to know than not know. My mom taught me that from the time I was two. It's better to know than not know, even if knowing is difficult. Know what you're dealing with. It's classic problem solving: What's the problem? Why is it a problem? Why is that gap there? It's the same logic.
Mark Graban: Thinking back to Waltraud's question, there's a lot we could dig into around why senior leadership would lose enthusiasm for the journey. Is there a gap that can be addressed? Is it a matter of not seeing results? Try to have that conversation.
Karen Martin: Or they could have had a faux Lean experience where someone came in and called something Lean and it wasn't Lean -- the classic way where, in the holistic view of how you achieve organizational excellence, it may have just been a bad experience. Any number of reasons.
Mark Graban: And there's a problem-solving discipline there around not guessing, not making assumptions. Go and collect data. And that data might be feedback.
Karen Martin: Just frank conversations can get us so much. That's the key.
Mark Graban: Another question here from Philippe. How do you prevent organizations from automating waste when AI enthusiasm pushes automation before processes are stable and standardized? Is there a practical readiness test to decide when a process should be redesigned first versus automated?
That's a question that's been around for a long time, even before AI -- different types of robotics or process automation.
Karen Martin: Yesterday we had our community of practice session on process literacy, fluency, and mastery, and we talked about this very subject of the overzealous "if we automate it, it'll make the process work better." I have always said that automating waste just makes the waste move faster. It doesn't do anything to improve the waste.
One thing I heard yesterday in the community of practice: one of the participants said she had read something on LinkedIn that she translated into her own thing. It was, "A process has to earn the right to be automated."
Mark Graban: Wow.
Karen Martin: I thought that was profound. The process has to be stable and consistently done enough and still have the opportunity to move the work along more quickly, with better quality. And also, let humans use their brains for what is a really good use of their brains versus doing mind-numbing work that can be automated.
When that process is going well and being done consistently, and you want it to go better, then that's the time to bring automation. And automation and AI are two different things. You can have automation within an AI environment, but automation is basically telling the work what to do. AI is thinking about the work and deciding what to do. That's how I discern between the two.
Mark Graban: When Karen mentions the community of practice here, I should mention that Karen is founder of TKMG and also TKMG Academy. The community of practice is part of TKMG Academy membership.
Karen Martin: Right, if they have an annual subscription to the full library. And if you get the letters confused, it used to be The Karen Martin Group. Now it's TKMG. It's not KPMG. That's a different company.
Mark Graban: Another question from James. Many organizations have a bloated number of managers and directors, but when true economic pressure hits, they lay off frontline workers instead. Have you found that to be true? How do you discuss it with leaders?
Karen Martin: I see it both ways. I see sometimes middle manager ranks get decimated also. Neither one is usually done with a whole lot of thought and logic. It's usually done a little "dark boardy," as I call it.
The thing that we talk about a lot, that I recommend everybody on this call talks about a lot, is that the front lines are the ones delivering value to customers. In most cases, they're directly delivering value. And the more you can get senior leaders to start thinking about that -- that the customer is actually paying for the work that the front lines are doing -- the more they rise up in a leader's mind as being the true value in the organization.
I say it all the time in our own organization. We've got one person that's doing the bulk of value delivery. I write the courses, but the guy that puts it all together after we film it, does the editing and the animation -- that's the guy delivering value. Not me at that point. The more you can get leaders to think that way, the more robust those decisions will be.
Mark Graban: It's interesting, especially when an organization announces layoffs and they talk about these middle manager roles and they're kind of dismissing the role. Part of me wants to come back with: Why did you allow that to exist? And was that the fault of the individuals? That sounds like a management system problem to me.
Karen Martin: And if you think about how Toyota has very few people that directly report to anyone so that they can spend a bulk of their time coaching and developing their people -- if you get rid of middle managers, now you've got someone higher up having way too many people to properly give them the support and development they need. It kind of flies in the face of good organizational structure to take out the middle manager ranks. And then of course, you can't just get rid of the value-adding people.
Mark Graban: There's this opportunity to coach and reinforce that leaders are there to support their employees. And if that's not happening, why? What is the gap in leadership training, management skills training? Where's the gap in the coaching?
Karen Martin: It just depends on how someone has come into a leadership role. If they've been a star performer, a subject matter expert -- one of my friends calls it being "hooked on the juice of being an expert" -- and then you get promoted into a leadership role, unless someone is directly helping that person realize there's a risk, they'll never switch to the juice of helping people and developing people.
I had that experience. I was a terrible boss back in my earlier days because I was such a subject matter expert and a bit of a star performer. And no one pointed that out to me. No one gave me any kind of leadership training. So I was terrible in the beginning because I was still behaving as a subject matter expert. And that's 180 degrees from what you need to be doing.
There are a lot of leaders out there like that. It's not actually any fault of their own, because the organization didn't really help them see that this new development need is there.
Mark Graban: James also asked: How can you get leaders to recognize that their job is to optimize the value-added work of those that they lead?
Karen Martin: We have a mantra when we're working with clients: A leader's job is first and foremost to develop their people so that they are in a position to meet the goals of the organization. And that's the sequence. You can't meet the goals of the organization if the people aren't being properly developed. That requires leaders to help people get barriers out of the way.
That doesn't mean a vice president should get into the weeds and do the heavy lift to move an obstacle, but they need to create the pathway and the authority for others below them to do that. It's supporting barrier removal versus actually doing it all the time. But sometimes the barrier's pretty high, and that leader is the one that has to remove it. Like if you have interdepartmental tension at a high level that needs to be addressed -- someone lower isn't the right person to be handling that. It's the leader.
Mark Graban: I heard Jeff Liker recently describe that hierarchy at Toyota and he said something about how they say "don't skip a hat." The hats represent different levels -- a team leader wearing a different hat than a group leader. You shouldn't try to escalate around a person. And the same was true in reverse. A leader shouldn't work around somebody; they should be working through the leader.
Karen Martin: You just triggered something we should probably mention. I have a long background in healthcare, and now I've been working in all industries. One of the things I never really understood until maybe five years ago was that a lot of industries had this thing called skip-level and "two up" meetings -- one-on-one meetings.
It's actually a really smart model. I've seen it work really well. You have a one-on-one with your immediate supervisor, and then you also have a one-on-one with that person's supervisor, so the more senior person has a clearer line of sight on what's happening or needs to be addressed below their normal view. Skip-level doesn't mean you go around. It means there's an invitation to have a conversation, but then there's a mature way that it gets worked back down through the proper ranks.
Mark Graban: Another question here from Danny. When a newly mapped value stream or process isn't being followed as intended, how do you discern whether non-compliance points to a flaw in the design versus a failure in implementation -- meaning we didn't engage people, train well, or reinforce new habits?
Karen Martin: Great question, and we experience it a lot. Here's the thing: starting from the very beginning, you have to engage the right people even before you do the map. The people that are mapping are typically higher in the organization because it's about prioritizing the improvements first and foremost. We're not in the weeds at a process level -- we're at a work system level. Prioritizing which of the obstacles to flow will be addressed first, second, third requires leadership consensus.
So the right people have to be involved in the mapping from the beginning so that they become the champions of all the work that follows.
Another tip: it's really good if you have a value stream manager or value stream owner looking over the whole value stream. That person's responsible for looking at the performance of the whole value stream, which includes whether people are operating the way the future state was designed. There should be very active improvement. The minute something's not being done, usually the value stream owner is talking with leaders saying, "We have this problem. It's not being followed. Here's the obstacle, here's why." Then you go through a round of improvement to eliminate whatever that obstacle is. It's not set in stone. This is the nature of continuous improvement.
More often than not, when we see this problem, it's because someone has done the map in a silo and given it to operations saying, "Here's your map, this is how you should work." And they haven't been involved at all -- which is just so wrong. Or there's no one minding it. Everything devolves into a state of chaos if you don't watch it. You need key performance indicators that let you know if it's working well or not. You've got to mind the store.
It's a lot, but it's how high-performing organizations do it.
Mark Graban: Another question from Ellen. When it comes to continuous improvement, what are the pros and cons of centralizing capabilities versus distributing them across the organization? Should the approach differ depending on the maturity of the improvement culture?
Karen Martin: Good question. I actually think both work really well in different settings for different reasons. But I'd like to step back and figure out what is the purpose of this team, whether it's centralized or decentralized.
One thing I see that does not work well, and it's pretty common, is that the improvement team is out there doing for people. That creates a crutch where people don't learn how to improve processes and don't have continuous improvement culturally embedded in their work environments.
What I feel strongly about is that the CI team's purpose in life should be teaching, coaching, guiding, facilitating -- and building skills into the workforce from frontlines all the way up to the C-level. In that regard, if you're playing that role, it doesn't really matter whether you're centralized or decentralized. There should be much more of a pull going on where people are pulling the CI team in. If they're being pulled in and asked to come help, they're not doing the work for people, they're teaching. And then that capability is getting embedded into the organization. Beautiful.
If it's decentralized, one thing I will say: it's good to keep a very tight and frequent gathering of those folks. And ideally one person overseeing it all so you stay cohesive. You don't want new terminology going in one part of the company versus another. You want a standard that's being done everywhere.
Mark, any experience with that -- centralization versus decentralization?
Mark Graban: It's one of those classic "it depends" answers. I agree with what you said. I've seen it work great when organizations, especially multi-site organizations, occasionally bring people together for a mini internal conference, sharing experiences and lessons learned. There's the need to make sure things aren't getting wildly different, but at the same time not keeping it stagnant. If somebody's done an experiment, share and reflect and bounce that back and forth. I've seen groups use a Lean Coffee format to give space for people to bring up the topics and questions they want to discuss with their peers.
Karen Martin: I grew up in a teaching hospital in Pittsburgh, Allegheny General. One of the things I loved was going to grand rounds. They wanted the residents and interns to be able to learn about the practice of medicine through real case studies. You could do the same thing with improvements -- a grand rounds structure where people present: This was the situation, this was the problem, this was the gap, this is how we did it. Almost like presenting the problem-solving story, with or without an A3 report, so that people can learn how the thinking evolved. Did anyone hit a minefield? What was it, and how did you counter that? Cross-pollinating and learning from each other is a very rich way to get better and better.
Mark Graban: Decentralized, centralized -- it could be a "yes and" moment. You have decentralized people, but even Toyota over time has had varying versions of a central "keeper of the way" type group that maintains standards and develops and coaches others. That doesn't mean the improvement is centralized.
Karen Martin: And getting back to org chart structures, which I still greatly appreciate -- you can have a straight line to someone you report to and a dotted line to a different person. Even if you have decentralized teams in different areas, you can still have one leader over those people. The structure can work either way, as long as the mission is accomplished.
Mark Graban: Question from Terry. I've used the X-Matrix template for Hoshin Kanri, but it seems to confuse many leaders. Do you have a favorite template and approach that leaders have actually embraced?
Karen Martin: Yes, and I'm with you, Terry. I learned about the X-Matrix back in 2008 or so and thought it seemed like a smart thing to do -- one sheet of paper, and so on. But over and over, clients were spending all this unnecessary time trying to figure the thing out. So I quickly said, I want them actually working on the plan and getting results, not doing gymnastics and turning their head.
So we linearized it. It has almost all the same things that are on an X-Matrix, just done in a Google Sheet or an Excel file in linear fashion. It's super effective. We have a course on strategy deployment, and it's one of the handouts.
Most of the time we use almost all the same columns, but we add columns. We sometimes have an area all the way to the right where we look at each item and which departments are going to be heavily involved, just to make sure no one department is getting overloaded. We do flex it, but it's still the top goals and which priorities will fulfill which goals -- all the same things an X-Matrix does. It's just not on one sheet of paper because it gets a little longer. It can sometimes fit on a legal size paper or an A3.
Mark Graban: I think it's helpful to separate the X-Matrix as one way of visualizing what's happening in strategy deployment. People could have a beautiful-looking X-Matrix but not have the thought processes around catch ball, gaining alignment, and prioritizing ruthlessly. Those management processes are the things that really matter.
Karen Martin: And managing the plan also. I hear this all the time -- people get the plan together, leadership may even agree on it and have really good consensus, and then no one's watching it. Then people wonder why there's no results. It needs to be managed. This is project management 101. Someone needs to own that entire plan. In a smaller company, it might be the CEO or COO. In a very large company, it might be the head of improvement or director of operations. It needs to be managed. You can't just let people go do their thing. There are fires to fight. People will fight fires in lieu of doing something new if you don't manage the process.
Mark Graban: My wife is an executive at a company that uses the X-Matrix as part of their Lean strategy deployment process, and she will literally be looking at the X-Matrix on her phone. And you know how I know? She's turning her phone and sometimes the auto-rotate trips up, so she has to lock the orientation. Otherwise you just keep turning. So there's another risk with the X-Matrix -- or you hurt your neck.
Karen Martin: I just talked with them and mentioned my concerns with the X-Matrix. We'll see how that landed.
Mark Graban: We've got another question from Swathi. When you walk the floor of a manufacturing company, what are the first two or three signs that they're operating with excellence or not?
Karen Martin: There's a thing you get when you go into organization after organization. You just get a sixth sense for the degree of stability, repeatability, and lack of chaos.
But more than that, it's visual. It's all the senses. Is it clean? Is it tidy? Is it more or less odor-free? Is it the right temperature? The right moisture level? When they pay attention to the environment, there's almost always pretty good attention to other things as well. I've never seen a deviation from that. When the outside looks that good, there's some care going into it. And that care usually translates into process design, equipment management, people selection -- everything.
I've never seen a beautiful operation be a mess operationally. And I've never seen a mess performing at a very high level.
Mark Graban: Little things matter. Little signs, whether you go into a restaurant and something just seems off. One thing I look at in hospitals is signs in the hallway that say "No beds or carts to be stored here" -- and there are beds and carts. Because I'm not the Joint Commission coming in. Those things are never there when the Joint Commission is there. But it's never a matter of beating up on the people. They had to put the bed somewhere. So, back to what you said earlier, we could ask why they're storing it that way. What's the barrier? What do we need to fix?
Karen Martin: Exactly. The visuals are all around us on how well-oiled an organization is versus not.
Mark Graban: Another question from Gail. What's one thing a Lean team can do to influence leadership in an organization where there is no top-down sponsorship or support?
Karen Martin: This is such a tough question. I guess the question is: What's the highest level in the organization that does support it? And can that person lobby, influence, sell the concepts across their peer group and get more champions?
In a very large organization, if the CEO's not completely dialed in and you have a division VP or a C-level division leader who is, you can actually get some pretty good progress done. In a very small organization, if the CEO doesn't have at least some interest, it's tough to be successful because there's just not enough leadership support.
One thing I encourage improvement people to do, especially if it's a full-time or part-time job, is to not be afraid to ask for conversations with senior leaders. Be candid about what you're looking for. "What would really be helpful to the organization would be if leaders might do such-and-such." See how open they are to it.
A lot of times leaders just get so busy that they don't even think they matter. I'm not kidding. Sometimes senior leaders don't even think they matter. And I will constantly say, "People are hanging on your every word. They are watching your every move. They are modeling. No pressure, but what you do and what you say matters a lot."
Don't be afraid to escalate and try to get conversations with people you need. And be prepared to sell them on why. It's not natural for people to just go, "Lean works because it works." You have to show them why it works and what the benefits can be, use examples. Because they're so used to having flavor of the month thrown at them that sometimes they get jaded and don't really stop to understand what Lean really is.
Mark Graban: Question from Nate. In environments where work is highly variable and workflows are non-linear, what adaptations to traditional value stream mapping yield the most actionable insights?
Karen Martin: A lot of value streams aren't linear all the way, and there are all kinds of things you can do. Remember what the purpose of the map is. The purpose is a visual reflection of the current state and a visual reflection of the improvements that a team is proposing for the future state. The real outcome of mapping isn't the maps. The real outcome is results. And the interim step between the maps and the results is a plan.
So it's: current state map, future state map, the plan on how you're going to get to the future state, and then eventually the results. The map is a means. It's a means to the conversations and the decisions that need to be made, the insights and the understanding.
We work with very senior teams always on our value stream mapping teams. There's never one leader on a team that can explain a whole value stream with any degree of accuracy. So the power of having the entire leadership team see what this work system really is -- that's great.
Back to the map as a visual storyboard of the current state: if you look at the maps in the original Learning to See book, it was a very simple value stream for a very simple process. That was intentional because they were teaching. In the real world, you can have some branching and complexity. Some work goes through the process steps one way, some skips step three and goes to four, sometimes the work splits and goes two paths and then reconvenes. You can have a little bit of that as long as the map is still readable.
But the last thing: you have to start with the charter. The charter needs a huge amount of attention spent on scoping. We end up getting the current state super narrow, and people get very nervous because they say, "That's only going to be this little piece of our whole business." It's like, "That's okay, trust me on this. Narrow in for the current state so you can get the map done, then design the future state." What you find is that almost always, that future state design applies to a much broader set of conditions.
It's only one value stream on a map. You can have some variations -- different types of orders or different complexity or different customer groups. But from request to delivery, that should be only one value stream.
Mark Graban: I think that's great advice. You might be mapping one high-volume value stream as opposed to trying to map every value stream on the same map.
Mark Graban: A question submitted live from Michael. What can I do for an organization that is so busy fighting fires that they're very slow to make improvements and "don't have time to solve the real problems"? They're spread so thin. Quoting Coach Wooden at them -- "If you don't have time to do it right, when do you have time to do it over?" -- that doesn't move the needle.
Karen Martin: Could we ask if this is an internal person or an outside consultant? It's a different approach, I think.
Mark Graban: It's internal.
Karen Martin: Is there a champion for this work? Is there a senior leader asking for the work to be done?
Mark Graban: He says yes.
Karen Martin: Awesome. That's a good sign. I always try to get the leader that's the champion to be very engaged in motivating the people. Explaining how it's hurting the business to not have improvement in place, and what the vision is for what the improvement will do for the business and for the people themselves.
You shouldn't be the one having to do the heavy lift to get people to come to the party. They should want to come because they're motivated to do so from leaders. That's the first thing I would do -- work that magic of getting leaders to get people excited about doing the improvement.
I love the Wooden quote. I use it a lot, and I use a variation: "But you're already spending the time, over and over and over. Why not just focus now for a much smaller amount of time than collectively all those over-and-overs, and get it done?" And sometimes I'll literally do the math: How many minutes does it take to deal with this? How many times per month or year has this happened? Okay, so that's the total. We're asking for three days. Or two days.
My heart goes out to you. It's hard. But you need someone besides you helping you sell the need. That's the bottom line. It can't be just you -- unless you're vice president or above, and then you are the champion.
Mark Graban: Another question that came in live from Shannon. Do you have suggestions for how to keep the momentum going for a continuous improvement culture in an environment where there's been a lot of executive turnover?
Karen Martin: This is another case of having conversations. Go to the new leaders and explain what they've walked into, because sometimes people don't tell them what the vibe of the organization is, what you're already working on, what are still problems. Help them see the momentum that's already been developed and how important it is for the new leaders to help carry that momentum forward.
Again, frank conversations. Don't be afraid to ask for help. That's the leader's job.
Mark Graban: Colleen asked: How would you answer the same question when there's a lot of frontline worker turnover as well?
Karen Martin: That's easier, actually. The only thing that makes it hard is if they get no training. Then you've got folks you might want engaged in making improvement who don't know how to do the work -- that could be really hard. But if they know how to do the work, it doesn't matter how long they've been there. In fact, sometimes new people have fresh eyes and are less dug in on the old way of operating. I think that's less of a problem than having leadership churn.
I wonder if Colleen could add -- is there something in particular that's happening with that churn that makes continuing with improvement more difficult?
Mark Graban: While we're waiting, I can speak to what we do at KaiNexus. We work very hard to have a culture of continuous improvement. Leaders really try to cultivate psychological safety, and the discussion about how every team member participates in improvement comes up during interviews and during onboarding. Not just setting expectations, but talking about how we bring things up and participate. You can't just say, "Here's the login to the tool, go do it." Our customers that are most successful do very similar things. I've seen hospitals where it's part of the onboarding. Fresh eyes plus knowing how we participate here -- I've seen people do great kaizen improvements on their very first day at a job.
Karen Martin: Me too.
Karen Martin: So Colleen answered -- heavy workloads. We've done improvement activities at all kinds of crazy hours because of heavy workloads and not having a bench to help people have backups so they can be freed up to work on an improvement. Sometimes it's a matter of paying them for overtime or doing it on a weekend or off hours. You do have to think about how to get the work done while you're also making improvement. That's a real logistics consideration.
But the lack of training Colleen is describing -- that's another thing. People need to feel like their investment in time with improvement is going to have some benefit for them. A lot of people have been told what an "improvement" is, and they weren't involved in it and it's not a benefit. It's a change but not an improvement.
Maybe that's where you start: do an improvement that's going to truly relieve them. And in the Lean world, there's a methodology called Training Within Industry -- Job Instruction. There are three branches of TWI, and that Job Instruction piece is hugely helpful, especially for more technical or physical tasks. It's good for nurses as well.
Mark Graban: I'm going to throw in one other question because I think this is an interesting phrase. Part of what Kim asked was: How do we make sure we're not conducting "gemba theater" visits?
Karen Martin: I love that phrase. We actually have in our gemba walks course an animation of theater curtains opening with comedy and tragedy masks.
First and most important: psychological safety. Michael Bremmer, the instructor for that course, talks about a situation at a Toyota plant where a supervisor was told by a manager to prepare a car to show a boss that was coming in -- they were having quality problems and were supposed to put post-its on the car. They were scared to death to point out problems, so the car didn't have hardly any post-its on it. The boss says, "Is that it?" And they're like, "Well, yeah, no, we..."
They finally papered the car with the different quality problems to prove they were actively working on problem solving. But they were used to not telling the truth and not showing reality.
You have to set that as a rule of thumb going into gemba walks. That's the expectation. When we go into organizations, even for an assessment, we beg the leaders to not tell people that we're coming until minutes before, because we don't want them to clean everything up and make it pretty. We want to see reality.
And then when there is something that's not so great -- that's reality. There better not be any punishment or even an eye roll. Nothing. If you ever want honest gemba walks again, you have to really support it with behavioral cues that it is okay to have a problem as long as we're working on it.
People come from all kinds of different companies where theater was the norm. So you have to say, "This company is not a theater company" -- if in fact that's true.
Mark Graban: Final question, from Natasha. What motivates you to not give up when teams or individuals you're coaching are stuck or not receptive?
Karen Martin: Because I love solving problems. That's a problem. That's a gap to be closed, right? People's resistance -- it's a gap to be closed. I won't do it alone, and I don't think you should either, Natasha. You need leadership support to get people's minds opened and wanting to do it. It needs to be endorsed. It needs to be sponsored by leaders. We always have an executive sponsor on everything, no matter how complex or narrow the improvement.
Over time I've learned that, with enough will, you can get there. Going back to people's pain: what is hurting them now? If they're not feeling any pain, it might be tough to get them to want to do an improvement. And then I would ask, is that the improvement to really spend time on?
If it's something that's hurting the company, then they need to understand how it's hurting the company. Sometimes people have no insight into what an outcome is actually doing at an organizational level. Teaching them and helping them see that can be a great way to melt away resistance.
I just believe in people. We set it up for success by having leaders involved. It may take a little extra time to get someone to turn, but they always turn -- if you're doing the right thing.
Mark Graban: That's well said, Karen. I think we'll end on that note. Thank you -- there are a lot of thank yous coming in from Philippe and Aaron and Dwayne, Colleen, Michael, and others. Thank you, everybody, for being here.
Karen Martin: Thank you, everyone. Good questions. Really good questions. We're corny in Pittsburgh. Thank you.
.svg)
Copyright © 2026
Privacy Policy