KaiNexus CEO and co-founder Greg Jacobson joins host Mark Graban for the eighth episode of the Ask Us Anything series, the recurring session built around questions from webinar attendees. This batch leans organizational. It starts with a question CI leaders ask constantly and rarely get a straight answer to: where should the continuous improvement team sit in the org chart? From there it moves through the real challenge of a Lean journey, the difference between transformational and incremental change, how to measure engagement honestly, and how to start improving when the team is already at capacity.
Here is what the episode covers and the thinking behind each answer.
An attendee asked, for a hierarchical organization like government, though the same applies to hospitals and businesses, where the continuous improvement team should sit. Mark had a firm answer. In the organizations that succeed with Lean, the head of the continuous improvement office, sometimes called a Kaizen promotion office or a Lean promotion office, reports straight to the executive team. The placement is a signal. Delegate continuous improvement too far down and the organization reads it, correctly, as not strategic and not important. A VP of performance improvement who does not report to the CEO or COO should at least have a standing seat at executive reviews, effectively a member of the executive team.
Greg's first answer was a joke, that they should sit in the gemba, but his analogy was serious. Emergency medicine is one of the youngest specialties in medicine. Before the late 1970s there was barely such a thing as an emergency physician, and emergency departments often sat organizationally under the surgery department. That structure made the ED subservient to the surgeons rather than an independent voice, and it shaped a particular, narrower kind of emergency medicine. Through the 1980s and 1990s, hospitals pulled emergency departments out from under surgery and made them their own departments. The lesson transfers directly. The closer the continuous improvement function reports to the C-suite, the more influence it has.
Mark added the part of the question nobody had asked: the role of that team changes over time. Continuous improvement usually starts as a program with clear ownership, and that ownership has to trace to the CEO. Over time, the goal is for it to become simply how the organization operates. The central team may shrink, but it rarely disappears. Even Toyota keeps a central group that maintains training standards and guards the source of what the Toyota Production System is. A good continuous improvement team does not drive all the improvement itself. It builds culture and capability, and like a good consultant, it should be working its way out of each role it takes on.
Greg made the point that size does not change the need. KaiNexus once worked with a 150-person company struggling to get an improvement effort moving, and stepping back revealed the gap: nobody owned continuous improvement. The assumption that only a large organization needs a dedicated improvement office is wrong. A smaller organization needs that person too. Their job is not to do the improvement work but to enable everyone else to do it. Mark connected this to W. Edwards Deming, who is often quoted saying quality is everyone's responsibility. True, but Deming also said quality starts in the boardroom. You cannot hand staff responsibility for quality and expect results if they are working inside a bad system. Greg closed the thread with an observation from KaiNexus customers. Alongside the central improvement specialists, the organizations doing this well grow local improvement champions in each department, people the specialists coach and who in turn enable improvement on the ground.
A question asked what the ultimate challenges are to a successful Lean journey, noting that many companies use the tools but, asked why, say only that they want to eliminate waste. Greg's one-sentence answer: changing the hearts and minds of everyone in the organization. Mark built on it. Culture change means changing how everyone works, and not only the frontline. It means leaders at every level, and there is a hard truth in that. The higher someone sits, the more years they have spent succeeding the traditional way, which makes change harder, not easier.
Both hosts returned to a frame they use often. Every successful organization gets three things right, leadership, methodology, and technology, at every level and in every form. Leadership spans senior, middle, and local team leaders. Methodology covers A3s, projects, and events. Technology runs from a platform like KaiNexus all the way down to paper, which is also a technology. The bigger the transformation, the more robust each of the three has to be.
On the waste question, Mark was careful. Eliminating waste matters, but a Lean journey that is only about waste reduction loses sight of the customer. Sometimes the right move is not to incrementally trim a process but to reinvent how value is delivered. Greg's qualifier: early in a journey, keep it simple, and if waste reduction is the simple thing, do it. The mistake is never letting the journey grow past it.
Asked how the deployment approach differs for transformational versus incremental change, Greg drew the line by direction. Incremental change is naturally bottom-up. It asks the people doing the work to spot opportunities, test changes, and evaluate them. Transformational change tends to be top-down, because it is bigger and costlier, and executives have to choose the critical few transformations worth the investment. Then he flipped it. Look at a transformation under a microscope and it looks incremental, thousands of tiny steps. Zoom out and you see an organization that changed. In that sense the two are the same thing seen at different magnifications.
Mark saw more daylight between them. Incremental change suits rapid-cycle experimentation: try it, keep it or drop it. Transformational change is riskier, so the PDSA cycle carries far more planning, and the iteration happens in models rather than in reality, computer simulation, mathematical analysis, cardboard layouts of a new factory or hospital tower. Nobody builds the building to see if it works. His practical heuristic, and Greg agreed: if a change is easy to undo, experiment quickly; if it is hard to undo, plan harder, and look for ways to break the big, irreversible thing into smaller reversible pieces.
An attendee asked how to assess employee engagement, specifically in a company with dominant market share and little competitive pressure. Mark treated it as a general question. The single best measure of engagement is the number of implemented improvement ideas per person, per month or per year. Surveys have their place, but when people can take part in improvement and choose to, that participation is the signal.
Greg added the crucial caveat: the average alone can mislead. Picture two organizations, each with a hundred people. One completes 200 improvements in a year, the other completes 100. The first looks better until you see that its 200 came from just five people, while the second's 100 came from ninety of its hundred employees. The second has the healthier culture. Lose one of those five and the first organization's numbers collapse, and meanwhile the other ninety-five people are contributing nothing. So look past the average to the participation rate, and to where improvements originate and where they land. Mark's analogy: the per-person metric is the final score of the game, the first number to check, but to really understand performance you need the equivalent of rebounds and blocks.
A question asked how a department spending 90 percent of its time keeping the lights on can build a continuous improvement culture and get that down to 80. Mark's reframe was almost cheerful. A team with only 90 percent of its time committed is in good shape. The real problem he sees is teams stretched to 110 percent, certain they have no time for improvement at all. Either way, the answer is to start small, with improvements that take little time, free up a little more, and compound from there. He was honest that there is no magic ratio. In organizations with a mature improvement culture, ask how much time goes to improvement and people cannot tell you, because it is no longer separable from the work.
Greg added that the right number depends on industry and on where the company is in its life. Early on at KaiNexus, most of the work was improving how they worked; later, with customers to serve, that share naturally fell. He closed with the mechanism behind starting small: habit. He recommended Charles Duhigg's "The Power of Habit" and its core idea, the loop of cue, routine, and benefit. It is why a daily huddle works. The cue is nine o'clock, the routine is talking through improvement, the benefit is improvement actually getting done. Run that loop and the behavior becomes part of the organization's grain. And the routine is small: huddles run two minutes or ten, never five hours.
The session closed with a short question: does Lean drive supply chain excellence? Mark's answer was yes, with the usual dependence on the organization's needs. Manufacturing and healthcare supply chains both respond to the basics, smaller batch sizes, better flow, level-loaded operations, and shorter transportation distances when suppliers sit close to the plant. His last point reframed the relationship. A Lean supply chain runs on respect for people extended to suppliers, treating a supplier as a partner rather than someone to bully on price.
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.
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.
See how KaiNexus helps organizations capture ideas, coach improvement, and connect daily work to strategy. See KaiNexus in action -> https://www.kainexus.com/continuous-improvement-software/kainexus/kainexus-demo-overview
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