KaiNexus CEO and co-founder Greg Jacobson joins host Mark Graban for the twenty-sixth episode of the Ask Us Anything series, the recurring session built around questions from webinar attendees. The questions in this batch return to fundamentals, but from angles that practitioners actually struggle with. How do you choose performance indicators when you work in an industry that doesn't look like manufacturing? Which problem-solving method should a team reach for at the start of its improvement journey? And how do you break down the silos between interdependent departments that keep blaming each other for shared problems? The answers keep circling the same advice: keep it simple, start small, and get people walking in each other's shoes.
Here is what the episode covers and the thinking behind each answer.
A reader named Isabelle, who works in the certification exam business and coaches groups to reduce process waste, asked how to determine performance indicators when manufacturing metrics don't map cleanly onto her work. Mark started with the classic Lean manufacturing frame, SQDCM (safety, quality, delivery, cost, morale), and noted that some of it translates and some doesn't. Office ergonomics might matter for safety, but it won't carry the same weight it does on a factory floor. The key is to look at your own business and ask what actually matters. He pointed to John Doerr's "Measure What Matters" for the thought process of figuring out which measures count, and noted that the strategy deployment process walks an organization through the same structure: what matters, how to measure it, and how to cascade it across the organization.
Greg's emphasis was on the K in KPI. Key. For the vast majority of people in an organization, the number of indicators they're watching should not be bigger than five or six. He cautioned against borrowing manufacturing numbers directly, because without a deep understanding of what they mean, they'll just confuse you. Better to understand the principle behind a manufacturing metric and find the parallel. A door-to-doctor time in an emergency department is corollary to a manufacturing cycle metric, but you'd only see that by understanding both. For a certification business, the parallel might be the number of people who purchase a certification, the number who purchase and then actually take it, the time it takes to complete, or the success rate. The point is to derive the metrics from your own work, not to import someone else's.
Mark added the line he uses in his book "Measures of Success": the K in KPI stands for key, not kajillion. You could order hundreds of laboratory tests on a single patient; that doesn't mean you should. The discipline is choosing the handful that actually indicate organizational health. He closed with the cascade. There are KPIs at the organizational level, at the division level, and depending on size, at the team level. That cascade is exactly what strategy deployment and catchball are built to handle, working out which team-level KPIs will positively influence the ones above them.
A reader named Carol asked whether the hosts have culture change improvement activities they find effective. Greg picked the question apart, gently. A culture activity sounds a little odd to him, because culture is the accumulation of what an organization does, not a discrete event. Seth Godin's definition is the one he reaches for: people like us do things like this. There is no single action that suddenly constitutes "doing culture." If you want an improvement culture and you're not currently doing organized improvement work, the move is to start doing the work, in an organized way, with whatever cadence fits, an idea board, a huddle once a day or a few times a week. Do that consistently, and one day you realize you've developed an improvement culture, because people like us do things like this.
He did offer one direct answer to the literal question: a 5S event in the Austin office that got everyone involved cleaning and sorting. A 5S expert might note they didn't apply every principle perfectly, but the office ended up in a much better place, and they've kept doing the activity about once a quarter. 5S is a good place to start because it's tangible and visible.
Mark agreed that culture isn't a set of activities, but added the case for intention. You have to be deliberate about stating the kind of culture you want. He went back to 2011 and 2012, when he and Greg and co-founder Matt Paliulis talked a lot about what kind of company they were building, how to set the tone that KaiNexus would be an improvement culture, fitting for a company helping others support their own. That upfront intention matters, because a startup leader who ignores culture until the company is five years old and growing fast inherits whatever accidentally formed. You can always course correct, but it's better to build the culture as you go.
That led to a book recommendation. Mark had just read James Clear's "Atomic Habits" and described it as a continuation of Charles Duhigg's "The Power of Habit." When you talk about improvement activities, you're really talking about behavior, and understanding how to create and change habits is fundamental to building both a personal and an organizational improvement culture. He recommended it strongly enough that his wife, a committed fiction reader who avoids nonfiction, got hooked by chapter three. Greg added an earlier book in the same space, BJ Fogg's "Tiny Habits," alongside Duhigg.
A reader named Lynn asked which improvement or problem-solving methods are more efficient at the beginning of an improvement journey, listing Lean, Six Sigma, DMAIC, design thinking, and TRIZ. Mark questioned the word "efficient," because effective problem solving often isn't efficient. It's iterative, a series of plan-do-study-adjust cycles. He'd think instead about what's simple to start with. Small Kaizen. Don't ask everyone to dream up a million-dollar saving or a giant innovation. Start by fixing something small within your own span of work, something that makes your work easier. He's seen in practice that choosing a problem-solving model too complicated for the need scares people off and kills participation. He credited Pascal Dennis, the former Toyota leader from Ontario, with the rule he keeps coming back to: choose the simplest problem-solving model for the job. Don't reach for an A3 when a just-do-it will work, and don't reach for a Kaizen event, which is genuinely complicated, without an expert alongside you.
Greg answered with a story about learning guitar at forty, after two or three earlier failed attempts. What finally worked was not getting bogged down in theory or worrying whether his fingers were in exactly the right place. He learned three easy chords (G, D, and A, definitely not starting with an F) and played a song he could have a little fun with, then built from there. The parallel to improvement is direct. If you want frontline staff engaged in bottom-up improvement, don't be hyper-critical about how they solved a problem. Celebrate that they identified one and tried to solve it. Over two or three years, the problem-solving capacity of that person or team grows enormously, and they'll look back at how crudely they did things early on. Five or six years into guitar, Greg now has 140 songs in his book and is finally ready to take lessons and dig into theory. The principle he wrote down to prepare for the episode was KISS, keep it simple, get people creating the habit of identifying and working on something, and don't bog them down before they've built any enjoyment or momentum.
Both hosts came back to the role of fun. Pascal Dennis talks about Kaizen having a playful spirit. Mark has seen it at Franciscan Health, where Joe Swartz and his team make the celebrations and positive call-outs genuinely fun, to the point that someone complaining about a problem gets a smiling "hey, that's a kaizen." The contrast Mark drew was his own half-hearted attempt at golf twenty years ago, which produced no enjoyment and went nowhere, unlike Greg's guitar. Greg's diagnosis, only half joking, was that Mark should have started at a driving range or the putting green rather than a course. Growth happens at the edges, just past the comfort zone, but not so far past it that you never get off the ground. Trying to play "Hotel California" the way the Eagles play it is not the right first song.
A reader asked how to defeat silos in an organization with interrelated departmental functions, to achieve synchronicity in service delivery, especially with Lean healthcare initiatives. Mark's first point was that, like culture, breaking down silos requires intention. You have to deliberately decide to do it. It's a core lesson from Toyota and from Deming: don't let well-intended optimization in one silo create problems for the system as a whole.
His most effective tactic is value stream mapping with participation from every silo. He'd predict, close to guarantee, that nobody in the room could map the entire end-to-end value stream alone. Getting everyone together to learn the bigger system surfaces incorrect assumptions and disconnects. The real value comes from actually walking the value stream. His example was the chronic finger-pointing between an emergency department and a lab. The lab blames the ED for not labeling tubes properly, the labels aren't vertical enough; the ED thinks the lab is being needlessly fussy. Walk the process, and the lab gains appreciation for how hectic the ED is, while the ED learns that the lab's barcode scanners genuinely can't read a label that isn't nearly vertical, and that re-labeling tubes risks jamming the automation. You might conclude the equipment should be more robust, but the walk dissolves the blame and builds mutual appreciation for how each side can help the other.
Greg added a few complementary moves. Light cross-training, even just walking alongside someone for twenty minutes, as a first step. Tiger teams that pull people from different divisions to work on a shared problem; KaiNexus used one across development, marketing, sales, and customer experience to build a new-customer swag box. And plain social connection. Once you've met the person on the other side of a process, you develop empathy for them. Calling up the lab when you've actually met the person on the line is a completely different conversation. To truly have empathy, you have to understand the other person is a human, and knowing them goes a long way.
Ask Us Anything is a recurring series of short sessions answering questions from KaiNexus webinar attendees. It is hosted by Mark Graban, VP of Improvement and Innovation Services at KaiNexus, with Greg Jacobson, the company's CEO and co-founder, and occasional guest hosts from the KaiNexus team.
See every episode in the series on the Ask Us Anything main page. Earlier episodes are also available on the KaiNexus YouTube channel and in the KaiNexus podcast archive.
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