KaiNexus CEO and co-founder Greg Jacobson joins host Mark Graban for the twenty-fourth episode of the Ask Us Anything series, the recurring session built around questions from webinar attendees. The questions in this batch sit at the strategic level. A CI leader wonders how to make the case for continuous improvement when leadership is preoccupied with cost pressure. A state government CI office asks how to roll improvement measures up across many independent agencies into something an executive can read at a glance. A practitioner asks the perennial question about when a Kaizen event is the right tool and when something else would work better. The answers run in a single direction: the long arc beats the short one, and the work of building a culture is not something to defer until the conditions are easier.
Here is what the episode covers and the thinking behind each answer.
A reader named Virender asked how to convince top management that continuous improvement is a key initiative that must be carried through during a recession. Mark separated the question. The first half is a familiar problem: how do you make the case for CI to executives at all? His answer is the one he's been making across the series. A culture built on many small Kaizen-style improvements has no single eye-popping ROI to point to, but the data across the KaiNexus customer base shows that when participation and enthusiasm build, a small fraction of those small ideas turn out to be large-impact ideas. You build the culture so that the occasional breakthrough has a place to land.
The harder second half of the question is whether CI is more important during a recession. Mark's answer was yes, more important, and the failure mode he most worries about is organizations cutting their process improvement teams as part of cost-cutting. That short-term move is genuinely counterproductive. The point of an improvement function is to be the part of the organization that finds savings without breaking the work. Cutting the people who do that is cutting the organ that finds the savings.
Greg made the case stronger. There is no more important time to have CI processes in place than during hard economic conditions. The habits of frontline buy-in take time to develop. You cannot turn them on when the recession hits and turn them off when it passes. Bottom-up improvement tends to surface employee satisfaction ideas first, then customer satisfaction, then cost. If you start with cost-cutting because the recession is here, you have inverted the order in which the practice actually develops, and you build a thinner, less durable culture. Organizations with a real CI culture also adapt faster. When the environment changes, they have the muscle to respond. Organizations that have not built that muscle do not grow it on command.
Mark added two more arguments worth holding onto. In a downturn, customers are price-sensitive, which puts more pressure on cost; if your improvement work is reducing cost without breaking quality, that gives you room to absorb price pressure without hurting margins. It is also a time to improve customer service and quality, because angry customers are quicker to switch suppliers when they have other options.
He closed with the Toyota example. The history is well documented. When sales drop, Toyota does not immediately lay off full-time workers. They scale back overtime, then let some temporary workers go, but the full-time workforce is treated as long-term capital. People work on training, process improvement, quality, and sometimes external work like Habitat for Humanity that builds leadership skill. Other automakers historically lay off anyone not on direct productive work. The two approaches reflect a deeper question about whether you treat people as a cost or as long-term capacity.
Marcia, who works in the central continuous improvement office for the State of Iowa, asked what standard measures she could use to roll up improvement reporting from individual agencies into an overall picture for the state.
Mark started with the classic Lean frame of SQDCM: safety, quality, delivery, cost, and morale. The order matters. Safety first. Focus on safety, quality, and delivery (which in healthcare is access to care), and cost improvement follows as an end result. Morale was added later in the development of the acronym, not because it is least important but because it is what enables sustained performance on the others.
Greg's answer was structured around the kinds of reports KaiNexus surfaces, which translate to any reporting environment a CI office might build. He recommended three categories. Activity measures: volume of improvements completed at each agency, the percentage that result in a change, and the duration from idea to completion. Those three together produce a vital-signs view of whether an agency is running a few large slow projects or many small fast ones. Engagement measures: not just total improvement count, but who is producing it. Ninety percent of the improvement work happening through five percent of the people produces very different culture data than ninety percent happening through ninety percent of the people, even if the absolute number of improvements is similar. The second is healthier because it does not depend on a handful of individuals, and the practice itself is spread across the workforce. Impact measures: improvements categorized by financial impact (cost savings, revenue retention, cost avoidance), and by qualitative dimensions (safety, satisfaction, time saved). At the state level, a useful rollup might be a single-figure first-year cost savings for the improvements that produced one, plus a count of improvements that touched safety, quality, or satisfaction. He cautioned against trying to standardize impact at too fine a level. Without rigorous standards on what counts as "high impact," the data gets fishy fast. Keep the rollup simple enough to be honest.
Mark added the case for measuring duration specifically. He had been coaching a non-healthcare organization where "continuous improvement projects" routinely ran for years, with most of them quietly timing out before they finished. The team's redesign focused on starting small and shrinking duration. Average project length dropped from years to a measure of weeks. That sounds modest until you realize what it means about the cadence of learning and the speed at which the culture compounds.
Greg connected the duration argument back to habit science. The habit loop requires cue, routine, and benefit close enough together for the brain to register the connection. If the benefit from improvement work shows up years after the cue that started it, the loop never closes, and the habit never forms. Long projects break the cycle that builds the culture.
A reader named Levi asked what should trigger a Kaizen event. Mark gave the triage version. When a problem surfaces, ask whether it is a just-do-it (small Kaizen, small PDSA), or whether it warrants deeper root cause analysis (A3 thinking), or whether it requires a compressed multi-day team effort with people pulled out of their daily work (a Kaizen event). The Kaizen event is one tool. Use it when the problem is bigger, cross-functional, and would benefit from an integrated, time-boxed push.
He shared a counterexample from an outpatient surgery center where the team's first instinct had been to run a Kaizen event. They could not afford to pull enough people out of operations for that many consecutive days, so the work happened over about a month in 90-minute blocks instead. The discipline of an event without the dedicated time. He also told the inverse story, from manufacturing: a team committed to a four-day event, started the first day, and within hours realized the work was actually a small improvement that did not need anything close to that scope. Practitioners build intuition over time, and sometimes you still guess wrong. Adjust.
Greg's contribution was a warning about over-reliance on events. He had talked the prior weekend with a CEO whose hospital had been working with a consulting firm whose entire delivery model was rapid improvement events, and only that. He has yet to see an organization develop a continuous improvement culture from rapid improvement events alone. Events are useful as a tool for complex multidisciplinary problems where compressed concentrated work matters. As the only tool, they hold the organization back, because everything that comes through the door gets framed as a candidate for an event, whether it is or not. Two or three years in, that pattern becomes counterproductive.
The history is worth knowing. Mark explained the origin: the "kaizen blitz" was brought to U.S. organizations in the late 1980s and early 1990s by consultants whose mostly-Japanese ex-Toyota staff would arrive for a week, run a structured push, demonstrate that change was possible, and then leave with the expectation that the host organization would continue with ongoing daily Kaizen. Toyota itself does not really run kaizen events in that form. The blitz was always meant as a demonstration vehicle, not the program. The pattern of treating the demonstration as the program is the failure mode that has dogged the U.S. adoption of Kaizen for thirty years.
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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