Karyn Ross opened the session with a deceptively simple observation. Customers hire service organizations to serve them — to give them what they want, when they want it, the first time they ask for it. What customers never want to hear is the answer "I can't."
And yet every customer has heard it, repeatedly, from organizations that should know better.
I can't help you because my system is down. I can't help you because our system doesn't do that. I can't help you because we don't offer that service. I can't help you because I haven't been trained on that yet. I can't help you because in my training I was told not to do that. Karyn shared a small example from her own life — a restaurant where her husband asked for a glass water cup, was given a plastic one, and was told by the cashier that glass cups were reserved for people ordering beer. When Karyn asked why, the answer was that the cashier had been trained that way.
The example is small enough to be funny and large enough to matter. The cashier wasn't unwilling to help. She wasn't unable to help. She had been trained into a response that prevented her from helping, and the training had been so effective that even the question of why couldn't penetrate it. The customer wanted a glass cup. The cashier had been trained that glass cups were for beer. The training won.
This is where Karyn's session went, and why it matters for anyone working in continuous improvement in a service context. The "I can't" response is almost never about capability. It's about mindset, training, and the absence of someone helping the person figure out how to do something they haven't yet learned how to do. The question for leaders and coaches isn't how to enforce better service responses. It's how to develop the creative capability that lets people figure out how to deliver what the customer is actually asking for, even when the established procedure doesn't cover it.
The answer, as Karyn walked through it across the session, isn't training. It's coaching — specifically, fifteen minutes a day, applied consistently, focused on developing creative capacity rather than transferring information.
Karyn Ross is an experienced Lean consultant, coach, and practitioner. She is co-author with Jeffrey Liker of "The Toyota Way to Service Excellence: Lean Transformation in Service Organizations," winner of the Shingo Research and Professional Publication Award. She has worked across industries including insurance, finance, HR, transportation, and retail. She is also a working artist whose original pieces accompany her teaching.
Karyn's framing of customer expectations is more specific than the usual language about "delight" or "satisfaction." She named three things customers want today, and the combination is what separates ordinary service from peak service.
Lean processes. What they want, when they want it, right the first time, with no hassle. The patience has run out. The tolerance for defects has evaporated. The willingness to navigate complicated procedures to get a simple outcome is gone. The benchmark is set by every company that has gotten this right — Uber, Amazon, the apps people use every day that work the way users expect them to work.
Luxury experiences at coach prices. The expectations have inflated across every category. Uber drivers don't just drive — the car is clean, the driver is presentable, water and snacks may be offered, devices can be charged. The price is half what a taxi used to cost. Customers have been trained by experiences like these to expect more, for less, everywhere.
Genuine human connection. This is the one most organizations miss when they invest in technology. The phone tree that promises to understand full sentences. The chatbot that handles routine requests. The automated email that confirms the complaint has been received and routed. None of these substitute for the experience of being heard by another human being. Karyn was direct: service is fundamentally about people serving people. The technology that mediates the service can help or hurt, but it cannot replace the underlying human exchange that customers are actually seeking.
A peak service experience meets all three conditions. What the customer wants, delivered in a way that feels like a luxury experience, with genuine human caring. When that combination is present, the customer experiences service excellence. When any of the three is missing, the experience falls short — even if the underlying transaction was completed correctly.
The reason "I can't" comes out of service workers' mouths isn't unwillingness. It's the absence of two things Karyn identified specifically.
The first is an idea about how to do the thing differently. The customer is asking for something the current procedure doesn't cover. The service worker has been trained on the current procedure. There is no obvious bridge between what's being asked and what the worker knows how to do.
The second is a method for turning that idea, if it existed, into reality. Even if the worker had an idea, they may not know how to test it, escalate it, or implement it within the constraints of their role.
These two missing things are what creativity, in Karyn's working definition, actually provides.
The word creativity carries baggage. Karyn was direct that when she asks audiences whether they consider themselves creative, most people look away, look down, or pretend they didn't hear the question. Very few raise their hands.
This is, in her view, the saddest thing about it — because it isn't true. The framing of creativity that produces this response is the wrong framing.
The popular version of creativity treats it as a kind of lightning bolt. Inspiration that arrives from somewhere outside the person. A flash of insight that happens to other people, to artists, to genius inventors. The implication is that most people aren't creative and never will be, because they don't have access to whatever channel the lightning comes through.
Karyn's definition is operational and inclusive. Creativity is combining previous knowledge and experiences in new ways to generate ideas about how to do things differently. That's it. Every person on the line, she said, has previous knowledge. Every person has experiences. Every person, by this definition, is creative. The question isn't whether someone has creative capacity. The question is whether the organization has helped them rediscover and exercise it, or whether the organization has trained it out of them.
This reframe matters because if creativity is inborn and rare, the response to "I can't" is to find or hire creative people. If creativity is universal but suppressed, the response is to develop it in the people you already have. The second framing is operational. The first is an excuse.
Most continuous improvement programs Karyn has seen focus on problem solving — identifying what's wrong, finding root causes, implementing countermeasures, measuring reductions in defects and complaints. This work matters. It also has a structural limitation when applied to service excellence.
The thinking involved in problem solving is largely convergent. The team narrows from many possible causes to one root cause, then from many possible countermeasures to one chosen solution. The mental discipline is to break things down, isolate variables, and converge on the answer. This is exactly what's needed for many improvement problems.
It is the opposite of what's needed for creating peak service experiences.
Creating peak experiences requires divergent thinking — generating many possibilities, exploring options that weren't on the original list, combining ideas from unrelated domains, imagining things customers haven't yet thought to ask for. The mental discipline is to expand rather than narrow, to put things together rather than break them apart.
There's also a question about whose interests the improvement work is serving. Karyn pointed out that many continuous improvement programs become internally focused over time. The metrics shift from "customers got what they wanted" to "we reduced complaint volume." The KPIs shift from "every customer had a good experience" to "customer satisfaction scores increased." The language tells you where the focus has gone. When the improvements are about internal targets, the customer eventually notices that the experience hasn't actually changed.
Karyn framed the shift this way. Problem solving and continuous improvement operate on "necessity is the mother of invention" — we have a problem, we need to fix it, the fix is the invention. Service excellence operates on "invention is the mother of necessity" — we imagine and create the service experience customers don't yet know to ask for, and that imagined experience reveals what was missing in the previous one.
The smartphone example she used is instructive. Thirty years ago, nobody knew they needed a smartphone. The need wasn't dormant waiting to be discovered. The need was created by the invention. Today nobody can imagine life without one. The pattern repeats across every service category that has been genuinely transformed. The companies that lead don't fix existing problems faster than competitors. They imagine experiences competitors haven't yet conceived of, and then the customers who experience them can't go back.
The next move in the session was Karyn's argument against the prevailing model of how to develop people. The model says: change thinking first, behavior will follow. Convince people of the benefits of a new approach, give them the information they need, and they'll decide to do something differently.
This model is wrong in a way that most organizations haven't yet recognized. The evidence is everywhere. Think about every diet, every exercise plan, every productivity system you've understood intellectually and failed to implement. The understanding wasn't the bottleneck. The behavior change was.
Training, in Karyn's framing, has additional problems beyond the general weakness of theory-first behavior change. Training teaches people to make the same response every time. She used her dog as an example: command sit, dog sits, six years later dog still sits because that's what training does. The training succeeded. The dog can't apply the training to situations the training didn't cover, because that's not what training is for.
When organizations send people to training and then send them back to work expecting them to apply what they learned to novel situations, they're asking the training to do something training isn't designed to do. The situations in the work area aren't identical to the training scenarios. The person was trained for one response. Their response to anything new is to revert to what they were doing before training — because that's the response they have practiced.
Training also reinforces what Karyn called either/or thinking. Do this or do that. The trained behavior or the untrained alternative. The thinking is constrained to the categories the training established, which is the opposite of the divergent thinking needed for service excellence.
If training doesn't change behavior, and changing thinking first doesn't work either, what does?
Coaching, in Karyn's framing, is daily interaction in which a person learns by doing with support. Several things about that definition matter.
The interaction is daily, or close to it. Not weekly. Not when there's a problem. Daily. The cadence is what makes the difference between a habit that develops and a series of disconnected conversations.
The person learns by doing, not by being told. The coach asks questions and supports the work, but the work is the coachee's work, and the doing is the coachee's doing. The coach is not the source of the answers. The coach is the source of the questions that help the coachee generate their own answers.
The support matters because behavior change is hard, and behavior change without support is harder. Karyn was direct that confidence comes only from doing — and that the doing, before you have confidence, requires borrowing courage from someone who already believes in your capability. The coach is the source of borrowed courage. Without it, the coachee retreats from the uncomfortable zone where learning happens and stays in the comfort zone where nothing changes.
The behavior comes before the thinking. When the coachee does something differently and sees the result, the thinking changes — because they've experienced for themselves that doing it differently works. The theory comes in small doses, just at the moment when it's needed to explain what just happened or to inform what to try next. This is structurally different from training, where theory is delivered in bulk upfront and the doing is supposed to follow.
Karyn was specific about a 15-minute daily cadence as her standard. The fifteen minutes is short enough to be sustainable on both sides. The daily frequency is what builds the habit. Together, they produce conditions where the coachee can be challenged into the learning zone, supported through the discomfort, and brought back the next day to continue.
The structure of a 15-minute coaching session is specific. Karyn asks questions designed to develop the coachee's creative capacity — questions that push toward divergent thinking, that surface "I can't" statements and convert them into "what could we try" statements, and that integrate Lean principles into the work rather than treating them as separate content to be learned.
The questions look like this. How could we accomplish that? What other possibilities are there? How could we combine those ideas in a different way? What else? And what else? When the coachee says "I can't," the coach makes the statement visible and asks what they can do instead.
The questions are deliberately open-ended. The point isn't to extract a particular answer the coach already has in mind. The point is to generate as many possibilities as the coachee can produce, then to help them evaluate which ones are worth trying. The coach is teaching divergent thinking by structuring the conversation around it.
When the coachee produces an idea, the coach helps them think about how to turn the idea into reality. This is where Lean principles enter — not as a separate body of knowledge to be learned, but as the practical method for taking creative ideas and implementing them in a way that flows value to the customer. The coach might ask: if you do that, how will it help flow value? How will it help us see what's happening? How will it help us tell whether the change worked?
The principles get inserted in small doses, at the moment they're useful, in the context of work the coachee is actually doing. This is the opposite of front-loading Lean theory in a training class and hoping people can apply it later. The application is the curriculum.
The case study Karyn shared from chapter 10 of "The Toyota Way to Service Excellence" makes the abstract concrete.
National Taxi Limo is a startup personal transportation service. Its vision of service excellence is "every ride, on time, every time, working together." The company supports driver partners — owners of small one- and two-car independent cab operations — by helping them become better business people.
One day Joe, one of the three partners running National Taxi Limo, came to Karyn with a problem. The driver partners were unhappy. They wanted to be paid within 24 hours, the way Uber paid its drivers. National Taxi Limo was paying weekly. The drivers were threatening to leave for Uber.
Joe's initial framing was familiar. Sounds like a good idea, but there's no way we could do it. Uber is a huge company. We're a small startup. It's impossible.
Karyn's response was the question she asks consistently. If Uber can do it, then clearly it's doable. Why can't we?
Joe produced a long list of reasons it couldn't work. The bank couldn't transfer money that quickly. The internal processes weren't set up for it. The technology didn't support it. Each reason was real. None of them was, on examination, immovable.
Karyn had Joe write down every "I can't" so they could see them. She told him to come back the next day with the full list. The next day, in their 15 minutes, they picked one to start with: the bank can't transfer money that quickly. Karyn asked Joe to generate a list of alternatives. He came up with several. Change banks. Talk to the current bank to see if they had a solution they hadn't been asked about. Look at non-bank payment methods. Use the payment app the drivers used. Use the scheduling app they all used.
Joe went away. The next day he came back. He and his partners had called the bank. The bank actually did have a way to transfer funds within 24 hours that nobody at National Taxi Limo had asked about. The first "I can't" had dissolved into a phone call.
The next 15 minutes addressed the next "I can't." Internal processes that prevented the transfer from happening. Joe generated alternatives, evaluated which ones aligned with Lean principles of flow and pull and minimized overprocessing, and went back to work.
After four days of 15-minute coaching sessions, driver partners were being paid within 24 hours. Something that had been impossible on Monday was operational by Friday. The drivers were happy. The partners were happy. And Joe told Karyn the thing that mattered most: he had gained confidence in his own creative ability, and he could now take that thinking and apply it to other challenges his business faced.
The case study is small enough to fit in a 15-minute story and consequential enough to illustrate the broader point. The "I can't" wasn't real. It was a list of unexamined assumptions presented as if they were physical constraints. Each one yielded to the right question, asked in the right way, supported by enough daily contact to keep the work moving.
A question came in about whether remote coaching can work, given that so much improvement work has moved to virtual settings. Karyn's answer was direct: she does it constantly, across clients in many parts of the world. The technology is good enough. FaceTime, video conferencing, someone holding up a phone at the gemba so the coach can see what they're seeing — all of it works.
She did offer one preference. A first in-person gemba visit, when possible, helps build the relationship and gives the coach a physical understanding of the work environment that's hard to replicate remotely. After that, the daily 15-minute sessions can happen wherever the coach and coachee are. The relationship sustains the work. The medium is secondary.
Another question Karyn fielded was practical. What if you ask the coachee to generate alternatives and they say there are none? After a few rounds of digging, they're genuinely stuck.
Her answer reframes the situation. When a coachee says "there are no possibilities," they're showing you they've reached the edge of their current comfort zone. This is a fight-or-flight response — the only two options humans have when pushed into genuine discomfort. The argumentative version ("no, that's actually impossible") is fight. The avoidant version ("I'm not going to think about that") is flight. Either way, the coachee is signaling they've been challenged into the learning zone.
The coach's response isn't to push harder in the moment. It's to send the coachee away to think about it. Talk to other people. Get other perspectives. Come back tomorrow with what they've found. The tension reduces. The brain has time to do its work below the level of conscious effort. The next day, usually, the coachee comes back with ideas.
If that doesn't work, Karyn's next move is to go to the gemba with the coachee — to physically see together the situation they're stuck on. Almost always, being present in the situation reveals possibilities that abstract thinking couldn't access.
The coaching work Karyn described is human work that no software performs on a leader's behalf. The questions have to be asked. The fifteen minutes have to happen. The borrowed courage has to come from a real person willing to show up consistently. The relationship that sustains the work develops between two humans over time, and nothing substitutes for it.
What infrastructure does in this context is reduce the structural reasons that good coaching fails to scale. A leader coaching one direct report can sustain the practice through attention and discipline alone. A leader coaching twenty direct reports, or an organization trying to develop coaching capability across hundreds of relationships, needs structure to keep the work visible. The fifteen-minute sessions need to be findable across the calendar. The ideas the coachee generates need a place where they live and can be returned to. The improvements that come from the sessions need to be tracked through implementation so the coachee experiences the result of their own thinking made real.
The "I can't" patterns Karyn described tend to be invisible at the individual level and visible at the aggregate level. One employee saying "we can't do that" reads as an individual limitation. Hundreds of employees saying it across an organization reveals a cultural pattern. Infrastructure that surfaces those patterns lets leaders see where the creative capacity is being suppressed and where coaching investment would have the largest return.
The Lean principles Karyn integrates into her coaching — flow, pull, leveling, visual management, waste elimination — are the operational vocabulary for turning creative ideas into customer-facing reality. The principles work better when the organization has structure to support them. Visual management requires something to make visible. Flow requires processes that can be observed and adjusted. Waste reduction requires the ability to see waste in the first place. Infrastructure makes these structurally easier without doing the underlying work for the team.
None of this changes what Karyn was teaching. The coaching is the work. The fifteen minutes is the work. The patience to ask "what else could we try?" one more time after the coachee has already said it's impossible is the work. What infrastructure does is keep the work visible and trackable across the scale at which most service organizations actually operate.
What do today's customers actually want from service organizations? Three things in combination. First, Lean processes — what they want, when they want it, right the first time, with no hassle. Second, luxury experiences at coach prices — the inflated expectations created by companies that have raised the standard across every category. Third, genuine human caring connection — the recognition that service is fundamentally about people serving people, and that no automation fully substitutes for that exchange. A peak service experience delivers all three. Anything less feels like a missed expectation, even if the underlying transaction was completed correctly.
Why is "I can't" the wrong answer in a service context? Because customers hire service organizations specifically to serve them, and "I can't" is a refusal of that core purpose. The customer doesn't care whether the constraint is real, technological, policy-based, or training-based. They wanted something. The organization didn't deliver. The "I can't" response signals that the organization has accepted constraints the customer hasn't.
What is Karyn's working definition of creativity? Combining previous knowledge and experiences in new ways to generate ideas about how to do things differently. The definition is deliberately inclusive. Every person has previous knowledge. Every person has experiences. By this definition, every person is creative. The question isn't whether someone has creative capacity — it's whether the organization has helped them rediscover and exercise it, or whether the organization has trained it out of them.
Why does Karyn say training doesn't change behavior? Because training is designed to teach the same response to the same stimulus every time. It works for that purpose. It fails when the situation in the work area isn't identical to the situation in the training, because the trained response doesn't transfer to novel conditions. People go back to what they were doing before — not because the training was bad, but because training isn't designed to produce flexible application to new situations. Coaching is.
How is coaching different from training? Training delivers theory upfront in bulk, in the hope that people will apply it later. Coaching is daily interaction in which a person learns by doing with support. The doing comes first. The theory enters in small doses at the moment it's useful. The behavior change happens because the person experiences for themselves that the new approach produces different results, and the new thinking follows the new behavior rather than preceding it.
Why fifteen minutes a day specifically? Because the cadence has to be daily for the habit to develop, and the duration has to be short enough to be sustainable on both sides. Fifteen minutes is long enough to push the coachee into the uncomfortable learning zone and short enough that both coach and coachee can show up consistently without burning out. Weekly sessions don't build the habit. Hour-long sessions become unsustainable across multiple coaching relationships. Fifteen minutes daily is the cadence Karyn has found produces results without producing collapse.
What's the difference between problem solving and creating peak service experiences? Problem solving uses convergent thinking — narrowing from many possibilities to one root cause and one chosen solution. It's the right approach for many improvement problems. Creating peak experiences requires divergent thinking — generating many possibilities, exploring options that weren't on the original list, combining ideas from different domains. Problem solving runs on "necessity is the mother of invention" thinking. Service excellence runs on "invention is the mother of necessity" — imagining and creating experiences customers don't yet know to ask for.
How do you help someone who says they can't see any possibilities? Recognize it as a sign they've reached the edge of their comfort zone — a fight-or-flight response indicating they've been challenged into the learning zone. Don't push harder in the moment. Send them away to think about it, talk to others, and come back tomorrow with what they've found. Almost always the tension reduces, the brain does its work below conscious effort, and the next day produces ideas that weren't available the day before. If that doesn't work, go to the gemba with them. Being physically present in the situation usually reveals possibilities that abstract thinking can't access.
What does the National Taxi Limo case study illustrate? That "I can't" is almost always a list of unexamined assumptions presented as if they were physical constraints. Joe, one of the partners at the startup, came to Karyn convinced that paying drivers within 24 hours was impossible. Each reason he gave dissolved under examination. The bank "couldn't" transfer funds that fast — except a phone call revealed they could. The internal processes "couldn't" support it — except they could be adjusted. After four days of 15-minute coaching sessions, driver partners were being paid within 24 hours. What had been impossible on Monday was operational by Friday.
Can coaching be done remotely? Yes, and Karyn does it routinely across clients in many parts of the world. Video conferencing works. Someone holding up a phone at the gemba so the coach can see what they're seeing works. The relationship sustains the work, and the medium is secondary. She does prefer an in-person gemba visit at the start when possible, to build the relationship and give the coach physical understanding of the work environment. After that, daily 15-minute sessions can happen anywhere.
Why does behavior have to change before mindset? Because thinking-first approaches consistently fail to produce sustained behavior change. Every diet, every exercise plan, every productivity system that people have understood intellectually and failed to implement is evidence of this. The understanding wasn't the bottleneck. The behavior was. When someone tries a new approach, sees the result for themselves, and experiences that it works, their thinking changes — because experience is more persuasive than theory. The coach's job is to create the conditions for that experience to happen, not to convince the coachee of anything intellectually.
How does Lean fit into coaching for creativity? As the operational method for turning creative ideas into customer-facing reality. Karyn integrates Lean principles into her coaching by asking questions like "if you do that, how will it help flow value?" or "how will it help us see what's happening?" — inserting the principles in small doses at the moment they're useful, in the context of work the coachee is actually doing. This is structurally different from teaching Lean as separate content. The principles become the working vocabulary for implementation, learned through application rather than through classroom training.
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