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Improvement programs rarely fail because employees don't have ideas. They fail because the ideas get lost.
A frontline operator mentions something in a hallway conversation, and the manager forgets by the end of the shift. A suggestion goes into an email that gets buried under thirty others. A maintenance request gets verbally communicated and never written down. The institutional drag of incomplete handoffs, fragmented systems, and good-but-not-good-enough intentions quietly turns a workforce full of insights into a backlog of unrealized improvement.
That's the problem Nick Shonsky walks through in this session -- specifically, how The Standard Group addressed it across eight acquired printing companies in Pennsylvania. The story is concrete, operationally specific, and grounded in the actual journey from late 2015 forward. It includes the obvious moves (5S, daily huddles, employee engagement). It also includes the less obvious ones (the role of shared terminology across acquired companies, the modification of the House of Lean to include culture as a foundation element, the Pyramid of Success that runs from commitment through ownership and accountability to trust and results).
What makes the session distinctive is the honesty about what wasn't working before. Nick is explicit that the continuous improvement team and the steering committee did most of the work in the early phase, that managers received instructions and didn't always follow through, and that the accountability gap was the biggest roadblock. The fix wasn't a single tool or technique. It was the layered combination of cultural alignment, shared language, daily practice, and infrastructure that made capturing and managing improvement opportunities operational rather than aspirational.
Nick Shonsky served as Director of Continuous Improvement at The Standard Group at the time of this recording. He has been at the same company since 1991, joining a week before he graduated from high school. He started in plate-making (back when that was a manual skill), moved into digital printing as a backup press operator, became a lead operator in 2001, transitioned to customer service and project management, and took on the continuous improvement role full-time in 2016 when the company committed to a Lean culture.
The session is hosted by Mark Graban, then VP of Improvement and Innovation Services at KaiNexus and the author of Lean Hospitals, Healthcare Kaizen, and The Mistakes That Make Us.
The Standard Group's history goes back to 1895, but the modern organization formed through acquisitions starting in 1983. By the time the continuous improvement journey began in late 2015, the company comprised six print shops in Lancaster, Berks, and Lebanon counties, plus a mailing and fulfillment business and a procurement-and-promotions company -- eight companies in total, each with its own established culture.
Each was a strong printer in its own right. Together they had become an industry leader. But the cultural fragmentation that resulted from the acquisitions produced a specific operational problem that turned out to be surprisingly important: people across the eight companies used different terminology for the same things.
Nick's illustration uses a simple folded brochure. The same physical product was called:
All four terms are technically correct. The problem is operational: a production planner from one of the acquired companies puts "barrel fold" on a job ticket, the production operator (who learned the work at a different acquired company) is more familiar with "trifold," and the moment of recognition that should be immediate becomes a moment of friction. Multiply that across hundreds of jobs and thousands of small terminology gaps, and the cumulative cost is significant.
The terminology problem is a useful entry point because it makes visible what most organizations don't see in themselves. The Standard Group's eight-company history made the problem obvious. Single-history organizations often have the same problem in subtler form -- different departments using different vocabulary for the same concepts, different shifts following different conventions, different facilities operating from slightly different playbooks. The cultural alignment work is the same regardless of how the misalignment originated.
The Standard Group's early work focused on the physical and operational foundations of a Lean culture. Nick walks through three components in particular.
5S as the cultural starting point. The company began 5S projects in their bindery department and expanded from there to other departments and other facilities. The reason for starting with 5S wasn't primarily organizational -- it was educational. 5S teaches frontline operators the basic concepts of continuous improvement in a tangible, immediately visible way. The first machine gets 5S'd. The next machine gets 5S'd. People notice. Anticipation builds. By the time the team is several machines in, the question changes from "why are you doing this?" to "when are you coming to my area?"
Plan 5 talks as daily practice. Other organizations call these huddles, stand-ups, or daily team meetings. The Standard Group calls them Plan 5 talks because they're five minutes long and planned at a specific time of day. The structure is standard across departments: yesterday's performance, today's expectations, department news (machine breakdowns, scheduled maintenance, employee vacations), company-wide updates, recent good catches, and recent reworks or defects. The reworks portion is fed by Nick or other steering committee members so that the same message reaches every department on every shift.
The five-minute commitment seemed like a lot at the beginning. People objected that stopping production for five minutes a day was unproductive. The benefit Nick names is that the daily structured conversation -- everybody in the same place, hearing the same message, with opportunity to interact -- far exceeds the production cost. The Plan 5 isn't just about information transfer. It's the mechanism by which the eight separate cultures gradually become one culture, sharing terminology, expectations, and concerns.
Modifying the House of Lean. Most Lean practitioners are familiar with the House of Lean diagram from Lean Printing: The Path to Success by Kevin Cooper (the book Nick references) or other variants. The traditional foundation includes 5S, standardization, and continuous improvement principles. The Standard Group added a fourth foundation element: culture.
The reasoning Nick offers: the first three foundations are the physical and operational components of Lean, but the beliefs and mindset are what make the physical components actually work. An organization can implement 5S, deploy standardized work, and run kaizen events -- and still fail to develop a Lean culture if the underlying beliefs aren't there. By making culture explicit as a foundation element rather than treating it as something that emerges from the other foundations, the diagram becomes a more accurate roadmap.
Two years into the journey, The Standard Group had built the foundations but wasn't seeing the cultural change they expected. The continuous improvement team and the steering committee were doing most of the work. Managers were accepting changes but not initiating them. Frontline employees were participating less than anticipated.
While attending the 2017 industry continuous improvement conference, Nick encountered a Results Pyramid from a company called Partners in Leadership. Their original diagram traced a sequence: experiences create beliefs, beliefs influence actions, and actions produce results.
The Standard Group adapted this thinking into their own Pyramid of Success, which became their compass for navigating the journey. The pyramid, from base to top:
Commitment. Without leadership commitment, nothing else holds. The owner is committed. The CEO is committed. The company is now working on getting middle management commitment to the same level.
Ownership. Each person takes ownership of what they're responsible for -- both what they do on their own and what they're asked to do by others.
Accountability. The Standard Group's definition: commit to what you say and do what you say. If you say you'll do something, you're now accountable for that commitment.
Trust. Commitment, ownership, and accountability together produce trust -- trust in yourself, trust in your coworkers, trust that the system actually works.
Results. Trust leads to results. The pyramid isn't aspirational -- Nick describes multiple examples of successful projects that map directly to the framework.
The pyramid is posted throughout the plant as a visible reminder. Employees see it daily. Customers and vendors who visit see it. The framework isn't just internal coaching material -- it's a public commitment about how the organization intends to operate.
The diagnostic move worth pulling out: if a continuous improvement program is struggling to produce results, the pyramid lets the team identify where the foundation is weak. Are commitments not being made? That's a leadership problem at the base. Are commitments being made but not owned by the people responsible? That's an ownership gap one level up. Are responsibilities owned but not followed through? That's an accountability gap. Each level supports the next, and weakness at any level shows up as weakness at the top.
By 2017, The Standard Group had the Pyramid of Success as a compass and the House of Lean as a roadmap. They also had a clear diagnosis of what wasn't working: accountability.
The pattern Nick describes will be familiar to most CI practitioners. Notes were kept in Word documents. Updates went through Outlook. The weekly steering committee meetings produced action items that lived in email and meeting minutes. Project tracking happened in Excel. The team had conversations in passing about improvements that mattered, and the conversations themselves didn't reliably translate into action.
Managers received instructions from the CI team or the steering committee and didn't always complete them in a timely manner. Employees made suggestions to their managers and the suggestions didn't always reach the CI team. The infrastructure that should have supported the cultural commitments wasn't there. The accountability gap wasn't a character flaw -- it was a system problem.
The aha moment came during a casual conversation. Nick was playing pool with a friend whose company was about four years into their own CI journey. The friend mentioned they were using an online platform called KaiNexus. Nick went home, looked into it, and immediately saw the potential. He arranged a tour of his friend's workplace -- a produce company called Four Seasons Produce, also in Lancaster County -- and brought the steering committee along.
The steering committee was impressed enough that they wrote a proposal for the executive team within the week. By the end of April 2017, The Standard Group was a KaiNexus customer.
The specific reasons The Standard Group invested in the platform map directly to the problems they were trying to solve:
It's a team-based management tool that keeps the organization on track with commitments. (The accountability gap.)
It empowers employees to have their voices heard immediately, with mobile access and a phone app for quick entries. (The capture gap.)
It's customizable enough to support the specific workflows the company needs. (The fit gap.)
It supports the Pyramid of Success by making commitments visible, ownership trackable, and accountability operational. (The integration gap.)
Nick walks through several specific applications of how The Standard Group uses the platform.
Default dashboards. Each user logs in and sees their own personal task list on the left side, with company-wide projects and opportunities for improvement on the right. The color coding is consistent throughout: blue for new items needing planning, green for active items with established timelines, red for overdue items past their original timelines, black for completed items. Anyone can view any item; providing input on an item adds the user as a collaborator going forward.
Mobile capture. Employees can submit opportunities for improvement or maintenance requests from their phones. The mobile app focuses on creation -- to do anything more than create, users go to the full platform on any device with web access.
Meeting documentation. Steering committee meetings are now documented in the platform rather than tracked through Word and email. Files, images, and web links can be attached. Meetings are accessible from anywhere with internet access. Nick describes a specific instance where a committee member who was at another building was able to participate in the meeting by pulling up the same documentation on their own device, even adding an image they wanted to share.
Rework and defect tracking. This is where the system produces some of the deepest organizational learning. The Standard Group performs root cause analysis on every rework. The platform takes the emotion out of the conversation -- the team focuses on facts rather than on assigning blame. The goal is awareness and prevention, not punishment.
The byproduct of systematic rework tracking turned out to be more valuable than the direct result. By analyzing root causes consistently, the team began identifying areas where the existing process was flawed or where no process existed at all. The reworks became a discovery mechanism for systemic gaps that would otherwise have been invisible.
Maintenance requests. The old process required employees to fill out a paper form, hand it to a manager, who would then complete an electronic PDF that went to the plant manager, who would assign it to maintenance. The handoff chain was cumbersome enough that requests often took weeks to complete, if they got completed at all. Verbal requests -- which were common -- often fell through the cracks entirely.
The replacement process: any employee from any building can enter a maintenance request directly into the system. The request notifies the plant manager, the CI leader group, and the department manager simultaneously. The maintenance team often sees the request before the plant manager has a chance to assign it, and they jump in directly. All requests are visible to everyone, which creates collective accountability.
Nick describes the result as transformative for trust. Maintenance requests now get completed at speeds that were "unheard of before." The accountability gap that defined the maintenance workflow has been closed, and the trust deficit that came with it has been replaced.
Several moments in the session converge on trust as the variable that determines whether an improvement system actually works.
The terminology problem damages trust between production planners and production operators. If tickets are unreliable, operators stop reading them carefully. If operators don't read tickets carefully, planners conclude that tickets don't matter and stop investing in them. The cycle reinforces itself in both directions.
The accountability gap damages trust between employees and management. If frontline workers raise suggestions that disappear, they conclude that participation doesn't matter. If managers don't follow through on commitments, employees conclude that the official priorities aren't real priorities.
The Pyramid of Success names trust explicitly as a discrete level. The implication: trust isn't a personality trait or a side effect. It's the predictable output of consistent commitment, ownership, and accountability over time. Organizations that try to skip the lower levels and ask for trust directly don't get it. Organizations that build the lower levels patiently produce trust as a natural consequence.
Nick is direct about how this worked at The Standard Group. The CI team had to prove themselves. They couldn't ask for trust based on their titles or their training. They had to demonstrate, through specific responsive behaviors, that commitments would be honored. The motorcycle parking spots example illustrates this -- not because the improvement was significant in itself, but because the willingness of leadership to respond promptly to a small frontline suggestion built the trust that produced the next round of larger suggestions.
The reverse dynamic also operates. When the production planner team trusted that operators would read tickets carefully if the tickets were accurate, planners invested more in the tickets. When operators trusted that planners had committed to fixing the tickets, operators invested more in reading them. The trust on both sides produced the behavior change that improved the underlying process.
Nick's session is unusually direct about how the platform fits into the journey. A few connections are worth naming explicitly.
The capture mechanism makes employee suggestions operational rather than dependent on memory or hallway conversations. The mobile app, the company-wide visibility, and the structured workflow ensure that ideas reach the people who can act on them without depending on each manager to perfectly remember every verbal request.
The accountability infrastructure -- the color-coded status, the visible commitments, the timeline tracking, the notifications -- makes the Pyramid of Success operational. Commitments become visible. Ownership becomes assigned. Accountability becomes traceable. The pyramid runs on the infrastructure, not on heroic effort by the CI team.
The cross-organization visibility addresses the fragmentation that came from eight acquired companies. Improvements made at one facility are visible to the others. Best practices that work in one shop can be adapted by others. The knowledge that previously stayed local now travels.
The root cause analysis tracking turns reworks and defects into a learning mechanism. The data accumulated over time reveals patterns -- which departments produce which kinds of defects, which root causes recur, which processes have systemic gaps. The patterns inform the next round of process improvements.
The maintenance request workflow demonstrates how a specific operational problem (slow response, lost requests, broken accountability) can be converted into a fast, transparent, multi-party-accountable system. The same architectural pattern applies to many other workflows -- not just maintenance, but any process where a request originates in one place and needs to be acted on somewhere else.
None of this substitutes for the cultural work Nick describes. The platform supports the practice; it doesn't replace it. The Pyramid of Success has to be lived, not just posted. The Plan 5 talks have to happen daily, with discipline, regardless of how busy the day is. The trust has to be earned through consistent responsive behavior over time. The platform makes all of this easier to operationalize at scale, but the foundation has to be built by people, not by software.
Nick Shonsky served as Director of Continuous Improvement at The Standard Group at the time of this recording. He started his career in the printing industry in 1991, a week before he graduated from high school, when he was hired at Acorn Press, Inc. He learned plate-making (back when it was a manual craft), transitioned to digital printing as a backup press operator and eventually a lead operator, moved into customer service and project management in 2001, and took on the continuous improvement role full-time in 2016 when The Standard Group committed to building a Lean culture across all eight of its companies.
Why does shared terminology matter so much in a multi-company organization?
Because terminology gaps create operational friction in places where it isn't immediately visible. When eight acquired companies each have their own vocabulary for the same physical work, a production ticket written in one company's language can be misread by an operator who learned the work at a different acquired company. The same dynamic operates in single-history organizations between departments, shifts, or facilities. The cumulative cost of small terminology gaps is significant. The Standard Group addressed this by working deliberately on shared terminology, posting it where the work happens, and reinforcing it through daily Plan 5 talks.
What is a Plan 5 talk and how is it different from a regular huddle?
A Plan 5 talk is a five-minute, planned-at-a-specific-time daily meeting that every department on every shift holds. The structure is consistent across departments: yesterday's performance, today's expectations, department news, company-wide updates, recent good catches, and recent reworks. The CI team feeds the company-wide and rework portions so the same message reaches every department on every shift. The discipline of the same structure at the same time every day is what turns the meeting into a habit rather than an event.
What is the Pyramid of Success and how does The Standard Group use it?
A five-level framework that runs from base to top: commitment, ownership, accountability, trust, results. Each level depends on the levels below. Adapted from the Results Pyramid from Partners in Leadership, it's posted throughout The Standard Group's facilities as a visible reminder of how the organization operates. The diagnostic value: if results aren't materializing, the team can identify which level of the pyramid is weak and work on that level rather than chasing the symptom.
What was the biggest gap in The Standard Group's continuous improvement program before they adopted KaiNexus?
Accountability. The continuous improvement team and steering committee were doing most of the work, but the broader organization wasn't following through on commitments. Notes lived in Word documents, updates went through Outlook, project tracking happened in Excel. Conversations about improvement happened, but the conversations didn't reliably translate into action. Managers received instructions and didn't always complete them. Employees made suggestions that didn't reach the CI team. The infrastructure that should have supported the cultural commitments wasn't there. The platform addressed the gap by making commitments visible, ownership trackable, and follow-through traceable.
Why does The Standard Group perform root cause analysis on every rework?
Because the analysis produces two distinct values. The direct value is fewer reworks of the same type going forward -- if you understand what caused a defect, you can prevent the same defect. The indirect value is more important. Systematic root cause analysis reveals systemic gaps that would otherwise be invisible. Categories of root cause (human error, missing process, broken process) accumulate into patterns that point to where the larger work is needed. The reworks become a discovery mechanism for the next round of process improvements.
How does The Standard Group build trust between roles that previously didn't trust each other?
Through the consistent operation of the levels below trust on the pyramid. The production planner / production operator example: when planners committed to creating accurate tickets and followed through (commitment, ownership, accountability), operators began reading the tickets carefully. When operators committed to reading the tickets carefully and followed through, planners invested more in making the tickets right. The trust emerged from the consistent behavior, not from declarations about trust. Organizations that try to skip the foundational work and ask for trust directly don't get it. Organizations that build the foundation patiently produce trust as a predictable consequence.
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