The session opens with Hernán Cortés on the shore of Veracruz in 1519. The story Taryn Davis tells — with appropriate caveats about how the historical record is contested, since most written accounts about Cortés appeared roughly 200 years after his death — is the one that gives the webinar its title.
Cortés and his men land. They look around. The humidity, the insects, the native populations, the uncertainty about what comes next — the bargain looks worse than they expected. The men want to get back on the ships and return to Cuba. Cortés has a problem: he can't continue the mission without them, and he has his own stake in the territory and the reputation that would come from completing the conquest. So he goes to the men. The story isn't that Cortés burns the ships unilaterally. The story is that he brings the men into a decision, and together they burn the ships. One ship remains. The rest go up in flames. The retreat is no longer available. The mission becomes the only option because the alternative has been taken off the table.
Taryn was clear about the moral status of the analogy. Cortés isn't a model for kindness or generosity. He went on to overthrow the Aztec emperor and seize Mexico for the Spanish Crown — not events to celebrate. What Cortés demonstrated, and what the analogy is for, is the willingness to take the option of retreat off the table when commitment to a change is what the situation actually requires.
The session that followed used the metaphor to examine what improvement work actually requires of practitioners and leaders, and where the work most often stalls. The hidden ships — the assumptions, habits, entitlements, and safety nets that quietly preserve the status quo even as people talk about changing it — are the obstacle. Burning them isn't always literal or dramatic. Most of the time it's a private decision that nobody else sees, made by the person who has to lead the change. But until those ships are burned, the change doesn't take root, because the option of going back is always there.
The session was structured around two halves: working on yourself first, then working with everyone else. Taryn was emphatic about the sequencing. "People can't follow you anywhere that you are unwilling to go yourself." If the leader hasn't burned their own ships, the team won't burn theirs either.
Taryn Davis holds her Master's of Library and Information Science from the University of Denver and has a background in Continuous Improvement and Organizational Development.
She is a thought pioneer in organizational excellence and seeks to bring people into a space where work is workable for all employees, from the upper echelons of the C-Suite to the line workers on the shop floor. Her passion is engineering processes and products that serve the well-being of the people responsible for and to them.
She runs TBD Strategies and works with organizations on the cultural and human dimensions of change — particularly the question of how to embed continuous improvement into the foundation of an organization rather than running it as a series of initiatives layered on top of the existing structure.
Taryn started by working on the definitions, because the language people use about change tends to obscure what's actually being asked of them.
Sustained, she pointed out, means ongoing — supported, maintained, not eroding over time. Change is a moment when something becomes different. Sustained change is closer to what most people mean when they say "transition" — the period of adjustment that follows the moment of change. Change is the event. Transition is the work that determines whether the change holds.
The distinction matters operationally because the practices that make a change happen are different from the practices that make a change last. Announcing a new process is change. Building the culture, habits, and infrastructure that keep the new process operating after the announcement fades is transition. Organizations that conflate the two run improvement programs that produce launches but not durable change.
The session's organizing image was a house. Taryn told the story of her parents' house, built a few years before the webinar. After construction was complete, she noticed a crack in the foundation in the basement. Her mother said the contractor had explained it as normal settling. Five to seven years later, the second-story deck and its stairs separated from the house. The shifting that produced the original crack had continued.
The point isn't that her parents' house has structural problems. The point is what the analogy says about continuous improvement in an organization. The foundation is invisible most of the time. Problems in the foundation show up in other parts of the structure first, where they look like local issues. By the time the local issues are visible, the foundation problem has been working for a long time. Fixing the local issues without fixing the foundation produces temporary relief, not solutions.
Most organizations weren't built with continuous improvement in the foundation. When a business starts, the founders aren't optimizing for how the work will be done in the most disciplined or efficient way — they're trying to get the thing off the ground. Continuous improvement gets discovered later, usually after the organization has accumulated enough inefficiency that someone notices and starts trying to do something about it. By that point, the foundation has already set. Continuous improvement gets layered on top as an initiative, an effort, a department, a methodology — but not as part of how the building stands up.
Taryn's framing for what sustained change actually requires: CI has to become part of the foundation. Not an initiative. Not a department. Not a methodology that gets applied when there's a problem. A lifestyle and a foundational decision that's embedded into how the organization operates.
What makes that work possible, she argued, is that organizations are simultaneously stable and malleable. The stability is what makes them organizations. The malleability is what allows the foundation to be rebuilt while the building is occupied. You can't add bricks to a poured foundation, but you can change how an organization operates if you're willing to do the work — and if you're willing to burn the ships that keep pulling you back to the way things were.
The first half of the session focused on the practitioner — the person watching the webinar, the CI champion or change leader who is, whether they like it or not, responsible for leading the shift. Taryn was deliberate about this sequencing. The question of working with everyone else only makes sense after the practitioner has worked through what burning their own ships means.
She defined a ship as anything that makes you feel safe, anything you feel entitled to, and anything that feels risky to confront or change. The framing is intentionally broad because the actual ships in any given practitioner's life are personal. They tend to be the practices, perks, identities, or assumptions that quietly preserve the practitioner's existing way of operating, even when that way of operating works against the change they're trying to lead.
Taryn gave three examples from her own career.
Her predictable schedule. When she joined her organization as CI manager, she had come from juggling three jobs and 80-hour weeks. The CI role offered nine-to-five hours, and she was thrilled — she was going to have her evenings back and arrive at work at a reasonable time. Then the operation needed kaizen events on three critical processes. The CIP (clean-in-place) cycle was taking eight and a half hours; it should have been four. Startup was taking three hours; it should have been an hour and a half. Changeover was inconsistent. The plant ran 24 hours a day, five days a week. Effectively coaching improvement on these processes required being there when they were happening, which meant being on the floor at 3 AM once a week for about two months, plus overnight CIP cycles whenever they ran. Taryn made the decision to put down her entitlement to the predictable schedule. The result wasn't just better understanding of the processes. It was buy-in from the team, respect earned as a leader, and a cultural shift in how the team approached improvement. The ship she burned was the schedule she had been promised when she took the role.
Her reputation as a professional. She proposed a full-scale training program for the entire operation, which would also require changes to the broader company culture. Her fear was that management would dismiss her — that she would be told she didn't know what she was talking about, that she hadn't been at the company long enough, that she should focus on something smaller. The ship was the safety of not making the proposal. The decision was to make the proposal anyway, knowing she would have to follow through and accept whatever response came back. The result was partial adoption — the program was embraced and made part of the company in some areas, with stronger adoption in some places than others. The honest framing she offered: partial success is the normal case. The pattern of getting traction in some places but not everywhere is what change at scale usually looks like.
The existing culture. This one, Taryn was clear, isn't a ship a single person can burn alone. The first two ships were hers to burn — she had the authority to make those decisions for herself. Burning the existing culture requires bringing the team along. The result of her attempt: success in some places, not across the board. Same pattern as the training program. Same lesson: not getting everything you wanted isn't failure. Everything starts somewhere.
The line she returned to twice in this part of the session was a reminder she invited the audience to write down: do not scoff at small beginnings. If you start somewhere small and then dismiss what you've started because it didn't match what you envisioned, you discourage yourself and everyone around you. The improvement programs that sustain themselves are the ones where small wins get recognized as wins, even when they fall short of the goal.
Taryn ran a two-part exercise during the session. She gave attendees 90 seconds each to write down the biggest challenges they had faced in the past year, then the biggest challenges they were facing today, then 90 seconds to identify a ship associated with each challenge — something they had either burned to achieve success in the past year, or something that might be standing in the way of success right now.
Mark put himself on the spot with his own example. The challenge he named was launching his book "Measures of Success." Two ships he identified: the perception that he is strictly a Lean practitioner (the book is broader than that), and the perception that he is strictly a healthcare practitioner (the book isn't strictly healthcare-focused). Both perceptions had to be put down for the book to find its actual audience.
Two attendees offered ships in the chat. Kerry named starting a new job coaching a senior leadership team without prior coaching experience for SLTs — the ship being the comfort of staying in her existing CI role. Douglas named "my assumptions about what's valuable" — the gap between his idea of value and the value priorities of his managers and stakeholders. Taryn flagged Douglas's example as particularly insightful: assumptions about value are often invisible to the person holding them, but they shape what the person fights for and against, and they can quietly prevent collaboration with people who hold different value assumptions.
The exercise's purpose isn't introspection for its own sake. It's to surface what's actually keeping the practitioner from acting. The challenges people listed weren't abstract — they were the specific things blocking specific work right now. The ships connected to those challenges are the specific assumptions, entitlements, or safety nets that are reinforcing the block. Identifying them is the first step toward deciding whether they're worth keeping.
Taryn walked through three words and the audience reactions to each, then named what she wanted the audience to take from each.
Change. Audience responses were a mix: resistance, possibilities, opportunity, "people freak out," loss, champion. Taryn's framing: change is your biggest ally. Most people in most organizations approach change as a threat. The practitioner who can reframe change as the raw material they get to work with — the thing that, when it shows up, creates the opportunity for the practitioner's work to matter — has a different relationship with their job than the practitioner who keeps hoping things will hold still.
Problems. Audience responses included fix them, opportunities, complaints, and "what's on the menu today." Taryn singled out the last one as the framing she wanted the audience to take: problems are the menu. They're not obstacles to the work; they're the work itself. The practitioner who shows up to a problem with the orientation of "what's available to me here" is operating differently than the one who shows up annoyed that the problem exists. The orientation is closer to what an artist brings to a blank canvas — the constraints become the colors.
Inspiration. Building on the "what's on the menu" framing, Taryn made the case that problems are where inspiration comes from. A practitioner with no problems has nothing to be inspired by. The problems aren't the inconvenience; they're the source.
Fear. Audience responses: unknown, focus, overcome, conquer, rigid, lack of understanding. Taryn's framing: fear is your only enemy. Fear of failure, fear of not getting the backing or support you need, fear that management won't get on board, fear that people won't fall in step alongside you. Most of the fears in CI work are about other people — what they will or won't do in response to what you're trying to do. The fears can't be eliminated; humans don't get to opt out of fear. But the practitioner who lets fear quietly drive decisions ends up with decisions that are reactive rather than considered. The work isn't to be unafraid. The work is to notice when fear is driving the bus and to put intention back in the driver's seat.
In the Q&A, an attendee pushed back gently on the framing — fear is going to be there whether the practitioner wants it or not, so what exactly is the ship to burn? Taryn's clarification: the ship isn't being afraid. The ship is letting fear drive decisions without examining whether the fear is producing good decisions. The practice is self-awareness — when you notice fear, slow down, look at the data, examine the assumptions, and lead with intention rather than reaction. Mark added that the fight-or-flight response that fear triggers literally shuts down the higher-order thinking that good decisions require — citing Robert Maurer's "Mastering Fear" on the value of admitting fear and asking for help. Children do this naturally. Adults learn to hide it. Leaders especially learn to hide it because vulnerability feels risky. The hiding doesn't make the fear go away. It just makes the fear's influence on decisions invisible.
The second half of the session shifted from the practitioner's internal work to the work of bringing other people along. Taryn was clear about the sequencing: you cannot work on this with everyone else until you've done it yourself.
She offered a five-step framework, intentionally ordered.
The first step is finding the like-minded people who are already pulling in the same direction. Not converting opponents. Finding allies.
Taryn checked herself on the word "partisanship" — it has a military connotation that some find off-putting — but she chose it deliberately. The original sense of a partisan is someone who has thrown in with a cause that matters to them. The frame she wanted was a group of people who are pulled together by something powerful enough that nobody is being persuaded or compensated into agreement. The work matters to them. They're in.
The leader's role in gaining partisanship isn't to recruit or sell. It's to identify the people who are already energized, encourage them in their own growth, ask what they're passionate about and how they see it serving the organization, and share the vision in a way that invites their input rather than asking for their compliance. The structure isn't top-down. It's a group of leaders, each contributing what's distinctly theirs, walking together.
She used English Premier League football fandom as the visual reference. The team without the fans is just eleven people playing a game. The fans turn the game into a shared event with energy and meaning. The fans aren't paid. They're not coerced. They show up because the team matters to them. Whatever the organizational equivalent looks like — and Taryn was clear it doesn't have to be sports-shaped — the dynamic is what allies look like when they're genuinely allied.
Once partisanship exists, the next step is engaging management.
The premise Taryn laid out is that managers at every level — bottom to top, including the highest C-suite leader — need to be reminded that their work matters and has impact. The practitioner who's pushing for change has to be able to do this for the people above and around them, not just for their direct reports.
She recommended Peter Drucker's "Managing Oneself" as a starting point, with the caveat that she isn't endorsing Drucker as the final word on management — she just thinks this particular article offers a useful frame for understanding how the people around you operate and how you can serve and support what they're working on. The framing she pulled from it: leadership is service. Inspiring management means understanding what they're working toward, where their constraints are, and how you can support that work while pursuing your own.
The other element she emphasized was passion — for your people, your processes, and your products. Without it, you can't inspire anyone. With it, you can pull a group of people toward something meaningful enough to change their environment together.
The third step is using data deliberately to tell meaningful stories that support good decisions.
Taryn's challenge to the audience: notice how many decisions in your organization are actually made on feeling or gut reaction rather than on data. She didn't offer a statistic. She suggested the audience find out for themselves and then challenge themselves to bring data into decisions that currently don't have any.
The discipline isn't manipulating data to support a predetermined conclusion. It's looking at what the data actually says, drawing reasonable informed conclusions, and using those conclusions to support the work with management and with the broader group of allies. The data has to be honest. The story has to be drawn from the data, not imposed on it.
The connection back to fear: practitioners operating from fear tend to make data say what they need it to say. Practitioners operating from self-awareness can let data say what it actually says, even when the answer is uncomfortable.
The fourth step sounds like a cliché. Taryn argued it isn't.
The premise is that opposition is inevitable and useful. Detractors strengthen the practitioner's platform by poking holes in the argument that the practitioner can't see on their own. Being grateful for detractors — rather than defensive about them — is a position that makes the practitioner more effective, not less.
The execution mechanism is the practitioner being their own best billboard. Walking the talk consistently is what shifts things. People who say one thing and do another teach their colleagues that talk is cheap. People whose actions reliably match their words teach their colleagues that their words are worth taking seriously.
Taryn used a writer's principle to make the point: show, don't tell. She offered two sentences. "Susie walked slowly down the road" tells you almost nothing. "Susie walked on the road, her head bent at a crude angle as she studied the snail and its path beside her" shows you who Susie is — inquisitive, attentive, deliberate. The second sentence does the work. The first sentence just makes claims.
The translation to leadership: stop telling people what you stand for. Show them. Repeatedly. In situations where it costs you something. That's what builds the credibility that opposition can't dismantle.
The fifth step is the practice of staying alert to opportunities that don't look like opportunities.
Taryn's frame: no two opportunities look alike. The practitioner who reacts to every problem the same way will miss the unique angle each problem actually offers. The practitioner who can pause before reacting, look at the problem from a different angle, and see what's specifically available in this particular situation will find opportunities the reactive practitioner walks past.
She used the visual of giraffes reaching for leaves in awkward ways. Giraffes are built for reaching tall things, but the giraffes in the picture are bent at angles that look uncomfortable, because the specific leaf they want is in an awkward place. The opportunity isn't the easy one. The opportunity is the one that's actually there, even if it requires reaching at an angle that doesn't match the practitioner's default posture.
The discipline also requires planning. The giraffes may not need a plan, but humans do. The prep work — the thinking through, the reading of the data, the conversation with allies — keeps the practitioner from digging holes by pursuing opportunities that look right but weren't sized correctly.
Beyond the five steps, Taryn offered two pieces of advice that cut across all of them.
Timing is critical. About two and a half years before the webinar, she realized she was seeing opportunities everywhere but the timing wasn't right for most of them. If she wasn't ready, if her team wasn't ready, or if the organization wasn't ready, the opportunity wasn't actually an opportunity yet. It might become one in six months. It might become one in three years. But picking the fruit before it was ripe meant getting something inedible, regardless of how much potential the fruit had.
The pear tree analogy was personal — she has one in her yard. The first year it fruited, she picked the first pear that looked yellow. It wasn't ready. The lesson generalized: ripeness is a real condition, and the practitioner's job is to read it before acting. Sometimes ripeness can be observed directly. Sometimes it has to be asked about. Sometimes it has to be sensed from being present and paying attention.
Communicate. The advice sounds obvious enough to ignore. Taryn argued it's the place where everything else breaks down. Over-communication is what makes shared work possible. Tell people the vision. Tell them again. Ask them whether they understood it. Don't assume — ask. Go find out what people actually think you said versus what you intended to say. The gap between intended message and received message is usually larger than the leader thinks.
The principle aligns with the Lean discipline of going to gemba. You don't know whether the message landed until you've gone to where the people are and confirmed it. The practitioner who skips the verification step is the one who's surprised six months later when execution doesn't match the plan.
The work Taryn described is fundamentally cultural. None of it is software. The willingness to burn your own ships is a personal decision. The discipline of self-awareness about fear is a personal practice. Gaining partisanship, inspiring management, killing them with kindness — these are relational activities that depend on the person doing the work, not on any tool.
Where infrastructure connects is in the visibility and persistence of the change once it's underway.
Sustained change, by Taryn's definition, requires the change to hold over time. The foundation work has to be visible and reinforced day after day. The behaviors that produce sustained change — the small risks taken consistently, the data-driven decisions, the relationships built through visible service — need to leave a trace. Without infrastructure that holds the trace, the change becomes invisible the moment the leader's attention shifts to something else.
The partisanship Taryn talked about — the group of allies pulled together by something meaningful — also benefits from infrastructure. Allies in one part of the organization should be visible to allies in another part, so the network can find itself rather than depending on chance encounters. The discipline of "do not scoff at small beginnings" requires the small beginnings to be visible enough to be acknowledged. Without visibility, small wins disappear, and the practitioners doing the small work eventually lose the energy to continue.
The data-with-strategic-intent step depends on data being accessible. The practitioner who's trying to tell a meaningful story with data needs the data to be there in a form that supports the story. The practitioner whose data lives in scattered spreadsheets, undocumented systems, or nobody's head is doing more administrative work to assemble a story than they're doing strategic work to tell it. Infrastructure that holds the operational data alongside the improvement work makes the data-driven decisions easier and more frequent.
The keep-your-eyes-peeled step depends on the practitioner being able to see across the organization. Opportunities in one part of the business should be visible to practitioners elsewhere. Patterns across multiple sites should be visible to leaders who could spread the response. Without infrastructure that aggregates and surfaces the operational reality, the practitioner is left to discover opportunities one conversation at a time — which limits how much they can see and how quickly they can act.
The communication discipline also benefits from infrastructure. Vision shared in a meeting fades. Vision held in a shared system that everyone uses gets reinforced by the repeated act of using the system. The discipline isn't replaced by the infrastructure — leaders still have to communicate, still have to go to gemba, still have to verify understanding. But the system provides a place for the work to live, and the place becomes part of how the message persists.
None of this changes what Taryn was teaching. The ships are still the ships. The decision to burn them is still personal. The five steps for working with everyone else are still the steps. What infrastructure does is preserve the visibility and continuity that make the work sustainable across the time horizons that real cultural change actually requires — which, by Taryn's framing, is measured in years rather than weeks.
What is the burning ships metaphor, and where does it come from? The metaphor draws on the story of Hernán Cortés on the shore of Veracruz in 1519. Faced with men who wanted to retreat to Cuba, Cortés brought them into a collective decision to burn most of their ships, removing the option of retreat. The historical record about Cortés is contested — most written accounts appeared roughly 200 years after his death — but the metaphor stands regardless. Burning your ships, in the modern organizational context, means taking the option of going back to the status quo off the table for yourself and your team. The retreat path no longer exists, so the change becomes the only option.
What is the difference between change and transition? Change is the moment when something becomes different. Transition is the period of adjustment that follows. Sustained change is closer to what most people mean by transition — the ongoing work that determines whether the change actually holds over time. Organizations that conflate the two end up running improvement programs that produce launches but not durable results, because they invest in the moment of change without investing in the ongoing work that sustains it.
What does it mean to "build CI into the foundation"? Most organizations weren't built with continuous improvement in their foundational design. Founders are focused on getting the business off the ground, not on optimizing how the work will be done. CI gets layered on later, usually as an initiative or methodology applied to specific problems. Sustained CI requires going deeper — embedding improvement into how the organization actually operates day to day, rather than treating it as something that gets done when there's a problem to solve. The foundation analogy: you can't add bricks to a poured foundation, but you can change how an organization operates if you're willing to do the work, because organizations are simultaneously stable and malleable.
What is a "ship" in Taryn's framework? A ship is anything that makes you feel safe, anything you feel entitled to, or anything that feels risky to confront or change. The actual ships in any given practitioner's life are personal — they're the practices, perks, identities, or assumptions that quietly preserve the practitioner's existing way of operating even when that way of operating works against the change they're trying to lead. Taryn's own examples included her entitlement to a predictable nine-to-five schedule, her reputation as a professional, and the existing culture of her organization.
Why does Taryn emphasize working on yourself before working with others? Because people can't follow you anywhere you're unwilling to go yourself. If the practitioner hasn't done the work of identifying and burning their own ships, the team won't burn theirs. The credibility required to lead change at scale comes from having done the work personally first. Skipping this step produces leaders who advocate for changes they're not personally committed to, which the team detects quickly and responds to with their own hesitation.
What does Taryn mean by "fear is your only enemy"? Fear itself isn't the enemy — fear is a normal human response that the practitioner doesn't get to opt out of. The enemy is letting fear quietly drive decisions without examining whether the fear is producing good decisions. Practitioners operating from fear tend to make data say what they need it to say, to react rather than respond, and to avoid the conversations that would actually move the work forward. The practice is self-awareness — when you notice fear, slow down, look at the data, examine the assumptions, and lead with intention rather than reaction.
What are the five steps for working with everyone else? Gain partisanship (find your allies — the like-minded people already pulling in the same direction). Inspire management (remind managers at every level that their work matters and has impact). Use data with strategic intention (tell meaningful, honest stories with the data you have). Kill them with kindness (be your own best billboard by walking the talk consistently; treat opposition as useful rather than as a threat). Keep your eyes peeled (stay alert to opportunities that don't look like opportunities; recognize that no two opportunities look alike). The steps are intentionally ordered and build on each other.
What does "do not scoff at small beginnings" mean? The improvement programs that sustain themselves are the ones where small wins get recognized as wins, even when they fall short of the original goal. Practitioners who dismiss small successes because they don't match the envisioned scale end up discouraging themselves and the people around them. The pattern of partial success — getting traction in some places but not everywhere — is what change at scale usually looks like. Treating partial success as failure makes the next round of work harder.
How does Taryn distinguish "burning ships" from "burning platform"? A burning ship is a commitment device — you've decided you won't retreat from a particular change and you've taken the option of retreat off the table. A burning platform is a sense-of-urgency device — something has been engineered or framed to make the current state feel intolerable and demand action. The two are related but different. A burning platform creates urgency without necessarily setting direction. A burning ship sets direction and removes the alternative.
What's the difference between taking a risk and taking a chance? Taryn agreed with an attendee's framing that risks can be measured and mitigated, while chances are more feeling-driven. Taking a risk implies that you've researched it, understood the variables, and chosen to act despite the uncertainty. Taking a chance implies that you're acting without knowing what you're acting on. The practitioner's job is to take risks with as much information as is reasonably available, not to take chances out of impatience or fear of standing still.
Can small risks help you avoid bigger risks? Sometimes, but not always. Small tests of change — piloting an idea in one area before rolling it out broadly — can reduce the consequences if the idea doesn't work. Small risks taken consistently can also surface problems early, before they grow into larger problems that require bigger interventions. The principle isn't that small risks eliminate the need for big risks. It's that small risks build the practitioner's ability to act, surface information that wouldn't otherwise be available, and reduce the scale of failure when failure happens.
How do you ensure buy-in? You can't ensure 100 percent buy-in. With good practices, you can get to roughly 80 percent. The biggest factor is relationship — people engage with leaders who have built trust with them through visible service to their interests and the organization's interests. The leader who treats people as instruments for their own goals gets compliance at best. The leader who treats people as people, looks out for them, and demonstrates over time that they're serving something larger than themselves builds the kind of buy-in that holds when conditions change.
Why is timing critical, and how do you know when timing is right? Opportunities have a ripeness. If you're not ready, your team isn't ready, or your organization isn't ready, the opportunity isn't actually an opportunity yet — even if it looks like one. The same opportunity might be ripe in six months or three years. Reading the timing requires being present, paying attention, and sometimes asking directly whether the people involved are ready. Picking the fruit before it's ripe produces results that taste bad regardless of how much potential the fruit had.
Why is communication the second piece of advice? Because the gap between what the leader intended to communicate and what people actually received is usually larger than the leader thinks. Vision shared once fades. Vision shared repeatedly, in multiple forums, with verification that the message landed, persists. The discipline aligns with the Lean practice of going to gemba — you don't know whether the message worked until you've gone to where the people are and confirmed it directly.
What additional resources did Taryn recommend? The Shingo Model for Operational Excellence. "Tribal Leadership." "Why Change Fails." "Managing Transitions." An article on setting strategic priorities. Kata in the Classroom (a scientific-method-based process improvement practice she found particularly useful when working with frontline teams). And local Lean networks — Taryn was emphatic about the value of state-level and regional Lean groups for connecting with like-minded practitioners across industries. Mark added the Iowa Lean Consortium, the Massachusetts Lean Hospital Network, and the informal Lean DFW group in the Dallas/Fort Worth area as examples.
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