Most organizations approach continuous improvement as an inward-facing discipline. Teams identify problems in their own processes. Leaders coach their own people. Improvements get implemented within the walls of the organization. The methodology produces results, but it also produces a ceiling. Organizations that learn only from themselves eventually run out of new perspectives, and the rate of improvement flattens.
The alternative is collaboration across organizational and industry boundaries. Done well, it gives practitioners access to ideas, struggles, and solutions that no single organization could develop on its own. Done poorly, it produces a stack of business cards in a desk drawer and no behavior change. The difference between the two outcomes is what this webinar is about.
Teresa McMahon, Executive Director of the Iowa Lean Consortium, and Stephanie Hill, Corporate Continuous Improvement Manager at Craig Tool, walk through what makes collaboration actually work -- the distinctions between networking, benchmarking, and collaborating, the trust conditions that have to be in place, and the specific operational practices that produce sustained value from cross-organizational learning. The session includes a detailed walkthrough of how Stephanie has used her ILC membership to build relationships that have changed how Craig Tool operates, including the relationships that led her to KaiNexus itself.
Teresa McMahon is Executive Director of the Iowa Lean Consortium and was the founder and first president of the ILC Board of Directors. Before her current role, she spent 25 years in Iowa state government, including as Deputy Director of the Iowa Department of Economic Development and as Performance Results Director of the Iowa Department of Management, where she was responsible for performance management across the executive branch -- implementing Lean Enterprise, strategic planning, performance audits, and organizational development. She is an alumna of the Lean Enterprise Systems Design Institute at the University of Tennessee Center for Executive Education, and holds a JD from the Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law and a BS from Creighton University.
Stephanie Hill is Corporate Continuous Improvement Manager at Craig Tool in Huxley, Iowa, where she develops the CI strategy, creates and implements training and engagement programs, and leads initiatives that deliver company-wide results. She has more than 16 years of experience applying continuous improvement across manufacturing, insurance, retail, and healthcare, with prior roles at Walmart, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Maytag, and Sherwin-Williams. She earned her Master Black Belt certification through Maytag, holds a master's degree in public health from Des Moines University, and a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Kenyon College.
This session was hosted by Mark Graban, then VP of Improvement and Innovation Services at KaiNexus.
The session opens with a distinction that gets blurred in most discussions of cross-organizational learning. Networking, benchmarking, and collaborating are related but distinct, and conflating them produces confused expectations about what each one can deliver.
Networking is exchanging information with someone to build a relationship that may or may not have a specific short-term purpose. The business cards collected at a conference, the LinkedIn connections, the introductions at industry events. Networking creates the inventory of relationships that future collaboration can draw from. By itself, it doesn't produce improvement.
Benchmarking is holding an organization or practice up as a standard for comparison. The intent is to understand how your performance compares to others and what they're doing that you aren't. Benchmarking is one-directional -- you're studying them, not building a reciprocal relationship.
Collaborating is working together toward a shared goal. The relationship is two-way. Both parties are bringing something to the exchange. Both expect to learn. The goal is specific enough that progress can be measured.
All three depend on trust and openness, which is why collaboration is so commonly underdeveloped. Trust takes time to build, and many organizations are reluctant to share what didn't work for fear of looking weak in front of peers or competitors. The candor about failure -- not just the celebration of success -- is what distinguishes genuine collaboration from polite information exchange.
Stephanie's framing on this: hearing about other people's successes is interesting but rarely actionable. Hearing about the specific challenges they faced and how they worked through them is what produces practical learning. The vulnerability required for that kind of exchange is the precondition for collaboration that actually changes how organizations operate.
Stephanie introduces a useful framing borrowed from her continuous improvement teaching. Improvement work is fundamentally about closing gaps -- between current performance and target performance, between current capability and aspirational capability. Several approaches can help close those gaps:
Classes and training. Webinars. Hands-on workshops. Books and online resources. Trial and error from your own past experience. And collaboration with people who have closed similar gaps before.
Of all these, collaboration is typically the least expensive and the longest-term in its payoff. A class produces a single learning event. A book produces a defined knowledge transfer. A collaborative relationship can produce ongoing value across years -- the same peer who helped with one problem becomes the person to call when a different problem emerges. Collaboration compounds.
The catch is that collaboration is also the approach most often skipped because it isn't on anyone's to-do list. It requires deliberate effort to build and maintain. The energy, discipline, humility, and selflessness collaboration requires don't show up automatically. They have to be cultivated.
Stephanie offers practical guidance for practitioners who recognize the value of collaboration but don't know where to begin.
Articulate your gap. Before reaching out to potential collaborators, name the specific problem or opportunity you're working on. "We want to achieve 75% participation in continuous improvement events; we're currently at 50%." "I want to present three new ideas per quarter to the executive team; I'm currently presenting one." The specificity matters because it determines who you should be talking to. The 75% engagement gap might lead you to organizations with strong engagement in any context, not just CI. The presentation gap might lead you to people known for compelling executive communication, not just CI peers.
Don't limit yourself to your own industry. Cross-industry learning often produces the most useful insights because the gap between contexts forces translation rather than copy-paste. Stephanie shares an example: a hospital in India benchmarked U.S. hotels to redesign their patient experience, treating patients more like hotel guests than traditional patient care. A call center she worked with collaborated with a hospital that was doing triage. The triage context wasn't a perfect match for call center operations, but the underlying problem -- handling urgent inquiries quickly and routing them to the right responder -- was similar enough that the methods translated.
Reach out to old colleagues. Past coworkers often become future collaborators if you maintain the relationship. Stephanie reconnected with eight former colleagues at a single ILC fall conference, opening up multiple new collaboration possibilities.
Use social media search. LinkedIn keyword searches can surface practitioners locally, nationally, or internationally who are working on the problem you're trying to solve.
Talk to everyone you know and ask better questions. Stephanie shares a story about her friend Laurie, who seems to know everyone everywhere. Laurie's explanation: she doesn't know everyone, she just knows the questions to ask. Better questions about people's backgrounds, the struggles they're working through, and the successes they're seeing surface unexpected connections.
Identify what you have to offer. Collaboration is two-way. Each person brings strengths that others can benefit from. The discipline of articulating your own strengths makes you more useful to potential collaborators, and easier to find through their own searches.
Invite people to coffee. Stephanie names this as her personal weakest point and the most important practice. Business cards in a drawer produce no value. The conversation that turns a business card into a relationship is what unlocks the long-term benefits of collaboration.
Contact authors. Authors of books, speakers at conferences, and producers of public content generally welcome reaching out. They wrote the book or gave the talk to be useful to readers. Engaging with them extends the value of their work beyond the original publication.
Search for local or national groups. Meetup groups, consortiums, and peer networks exist for almost every CI topic. Joining a variety of them rather than only groups within your own industry expands the range of perspectives you encounter.
Be open to what you might learn. Every interaction with a group of practitioners produces at least one takeaway that can be applied back home. The discipline is showing up open to that exchange rather than expecting to teach more than you learn.
Teresa walks through the operational mechanics of how the ILC supports cross-organizational learning. The consortium is a nonprofit member-driven organization that has been active since 2010. At the time of the webinar, it included about 120 member organizations across the state of Iowa.
The mission is straightforward: drive competitive performance improvements by expanding Lean culture and sharing lessons learned. The aspiration extends beyond Lean specifically to operational excellence more broadly. The consortium operates as a connector rather than a provider -- helping bring members together rather than delivering training or content directly.
Several characteristics distinguish the ILC from typical industry associations:
Member-driven programming. The consortium relies on members to identify what they need rather than designing programs from the top down. This keeps the offerings aligned with what practitioners are actually working on.
Cross-sector participation. Members span manufacturing, healthcare, education, government, service, and transaction-based businesses. The cross-sector mix is deliberate. The premise: culture development comes down to working with people, and the specifics of what an organization does matter less than commonly assumed for the kind of learning that produces improvement capability.
Integrity and trust as explicit core values. Member organizations have repeatedly allowed competitors into their facilities for site visits and shared learning events. This level of trust is rare in industry groups, and Teresa names it as one of the consortium's most distinctive strengths.
Programs for all maturity levels and roles. The ILC includes members in year one of their Lean journey and members 20+ years in. Programming is designed for frontline managers and for executives. The variety lets practitioners find peers at their own altitude while exposing them to perspectives from earlier and later stages.
The most operationally useful section of the webinar is Stephanie's specific walkthrough of how she has translated ILC membership into improvement work at Craig Tool. The walkthrough makes the abstract argument for collaboration concrete by showing the chain of relationships and outcomes.
Speaking at events. Stephanie spoke at an ILC event and was approached afterward by Gary from the Iowa Quality Center, who wanted to talk further about Baldrige. The conversation led to Gary visiting Craig Tool and eventually mentoring one of Stephanie's employees through Iowa Quality Center Green Belt training.
Bringing in national speakers. Jean Cunningham presented to the ILC on Lean accounting. Craig Tool team members in the audience recognized an opportunity for their own organization. Jean came to Craig Tool for a couple of days to provide specific advice on their journey toward Lean accounting.
Hosting in-house events through the ILC calendar. Craig Tool opened some of their continuous improvement events to other ILC members. Pam Petjoven from the University of Iowa Community Credit Union and Jeff Pike from Hubbell Realty attended. Pam was the person who first introduced Stephanie to KaiNexus. Jeff shared reading materials and a mind map of his continuous improvement strategy that Stephanie still references.
Site visits at other member organizations. Stephanie visited Vermeer, a manufacturer with significant automation work, and her VP of Operations followed up with Gary Kopecky to learn more. She also met Nikki Wallace from Aerotek Recruiting and Staffing at the same visit. Nikki had recently moved into CI recruiting from engineering recruiting; Stephanie hosted her and colleagues at Craig Tool to provide CI fundamentals training so Nikki could better serve her clients.
The ILC members' Slack forum. One of Stephanie's employees posted in the ILC Slack looking for organizations using KaiNexus. The response connected them to Mary Greeley Medical Center. Ron Smith invited Craig Tool to visit and learn how Mary Greeley uses KaiNexus alongside their broader CI program. Stephanie brought ten employees to Mary Greeley for the site visit. The visit influenced Craig Tool's adoption of KaiNexus and shaped how they think about CI program design.
Steve Forbes from Iowa Prison Industries reached out through the ILC for help with training. Stephanie was initially unfamiliar with what Iowa Prison Industries actually does but was impressed by the scope of their manufacturing and supply to state and nonprofit agencies. Steve later hosted a Lean Coffee.
Lean Coffees. Stephanie has used the Lean Coffee format extensively as a collaboration vehicle. At one Lean Coffee hosted by 3E, she met Matt Times from Tension Corporation, a manufacturer of envelopes. They got into a conversation about scheduling across three-shift operations. At another Lean Coffee, hosted by Iowa Prison Industries, she met Wade Sherman, also from Tension. Wade was interested in how Craig Tool applies CI in office settings. Both Matt and Wade were scheduled to visit Craig Tool the following month for deeper learning exchanges.
The chain of these relationships illustrates what collaboration actually looks like when an organization commits to it as a discipline rather than a one-time event. None of these connections produced immediate dramatic results. Each one produced incremental value, and the relationships compound over time.
Teresa and Stephanie walk through the Lean Coffee format because it has been one of the most effective collaboration vehicles in the ILC ecosystem.
Lean Coffee was started in 2009 by Jim Benson and Jeremy Lightsmith in Seattle. The format is deliberately lightweight. A group of practitioners gathers for 75 minutes. Participants propose topics they want to discuss. The group votes on which topics to prioritize. Discussion of each topic is time-boxed, with the group voting whether to continue or move to the next topic. There's no agenda set by an organizer. There's no presenter. The conversation is driven by what participants actually want to discuss.
The format works because it removes the bureaucracy and administration that prevents practitioners from getting together. Anyone can host a Lean Coffee. The ILC provides a basic format and lets local hosts run with it.
The ILC began hosting Lean Coffees in Des Moines in 2016. At the time of the webinar, there were five Lean Coffees in Iowa and one in Omaha, with a seventh starting in Northeast Iowa. Together they provide at least six monthly opportunities for ILC members to meet face-to-face.
The geographic distribution matters. National webinars and online events serve members across the state, but they can't substitute for face-to-face interaction. The Lean Coffees give members in rural and smaller-metro areas a way to participate in the consortium without traveling to Des Moines.
Stephanie closes the session with a frame on what makes ongoing collaboration possible. Three qualities are non-negotiable:
Energy and discipline. Collaboration rarely shows up on anyone's to-do list. It has to be prioritized deliberately, against all the other demands competing for attention. Without discipline, collaboration drops off the list during busy periods and never comes back.
Humility and self-reflection. You can't collaborate productively if you assume you have nothing to learn. Honest assessment of your own gaps is the precondition for asking the questions that produce real value from peers.
Selflessness. Collaboration is about giving as well as receiving. The practitioners who get the most from collaboration are usually the ones who give the most.
The framing reinforces an earlier point. Collaboration is a long-term capability, not a one-time event. Organizations that build it as a capability find that the value compounds. Organizations that treat it as an event get inspiration but not sustained behavior change.
Stephanie's story about how Craig Tool came to KaiNexus through her ILC relationships is one of the more direct illustrations available of how peer learning networks influence software adoption. Pam Petjoven introduced her to the platform during a site visit. The Mary Greeley connection through the ILC Slack forum gave Craig Tool a chance to see KaiNexus in operation alongside a mature CI program. The decision to adopt was informed by both relationships.
For practitioners who participate in peer learning networks, the platform supports several disciplines the session names directly:
The knowledge repository function is the operational form of what gets lost without a system. When a Craig Tool team returns from a Mary Greeley site visit with specific ideas about how to design their CI program, the platform holds those ideas where they can be turned into specific improvement work rather than fading into the inbox archive within weeks.
The lateral spread of improvements -- yokoten in the Toyota tradition Teresa references -- depends on visibility. The platform makes improvement work visible across the enterprise, which is what makes deliberate replication possible across facilities, departments, or even peer organizations within a consortium.
The discipline of capturing what's learned during site visits, Lean Coffees, and conferences benefits from a system that holds the learning durably. Without it, peer learning produces inspiration without sustained behavior change. Stephanie's framing -- that collaboration is the gift that keeps on giving -- only holds if the gifts can be captured and acted on rather than slipping away.
For organizations not yet participating in a peer learning network, the platform also supports the internal version of the same disciplines. The lateral spread that the ILC supports between organizations can happen within a single organization across its departments and facilities, and the same infrastructure supports both.
What is the Iowa Lean Consortium?
A nonprofit member-driven organization active since 2010, with about 120 member organizations across Iowa at the time of this webinar. The consortium drives competitive performance improvements by expanding Lean culture and sharing lessons learned across member organizations. Membership spans manufacturing, healthcare, education, government, service, and transaction-based businesses. The consortium operates as a connector rather than a provider -- helping bring members together for learning and networking rather than delivering training or content directly. More at iowalean.org.
What is the difference between networking, benchmarking, and collaborating?
Networking is exchanging information with someone to build a relationship that may or may not have a specific short-term purpose. Benchmarking is holding an organization or practice up as a standard for comparison, with the intent of understanding how your performance compares to others. Collaborating is working together toward a shared goal, with both parties bringing something to the exchange and both expecting to learn. All three depend on trust and openness, but only collaboration produces the ongoing reciprocal exchange that compounds over time.
Why is collaboration often skipped?
It rarely shows up on anyone's to-do list. Other demands -- fires to put out, projects to deliver, meetings to attend -- crowd it out. Without deliberate prioritization, collaboration drops off during busy periods and never comes back. It also requires humility (admitting what you don't know) and selflessness (giving as well as receiving), which aren't automatic responses for most practitioners.
How do I start collaborating if I don't know where to begin?
Articulate your specific gap. Reach out to old colleagues. Use LinkedIn keyword search to find practitioners working on similar problems. Talk to everyone you know and ask better questions about their backgrounds and struggles. Identify what you personally have to offer. Invite people to coffee. Contact authors of books or speakers at events. Search for local or national peer groups focused on your topic. Look outside your industry, not just within it. Be open to what you might learn from any interaction.
Why look outside your own industry for collaboration?
The gap between contexts forces translation rather than copy-paste, which often produces more useful insights. The webinar shares two examples: a hospital in India that benchmarked U.S. hotels to redesign patient experience, treating patients more like hotel guests; and a call center that collaborated with a hospital doing triage, applying methods from urgent care to urgent call handling. The cross-industry learning produced ideas that wouldn't have emerged from talking only to peers in the same industry.
What is a Lean Coffee?
A lightweight discussion format started in 2009 by Jim Benson and Jeremy Lightsmith in Seattle. A group of practitioners gathers for 75 minutes. Participants propose topics. The group votes on which to prioritize. Discussion of each topic is time-boxed, with the group voting whether to continue or move on. No agenda is set by an organizer. No formal presenter. The conversation is driven by what participants actually want to discuss. The format works because it removes the bureaucracy that prevents practitioners from getting together.
How do you bring in outsiders to participate in a Kaizen event?
Bringing in outsiders for Kaizen events produces tremendous value because they see the process with fresh eyes and ask the questions insiders no longer think to ask. The webinar recommends having someone in every event who knows very little about the process being improved -- whether the facilitator or another participant. Practical considerations: make sure your non-disclosure or confidentiality agreements are in order before bringing outsiders into operational areas, since the value of the exchange depends on being able to discuss real operational details.
How do you select the right Kaizen event?
The session offers two complementary approaches. Top-down: identify gaps in cross-functional processes that span departments, then launch events to resolve those gaps. Bottom-up: respond to specific problems that frontline practitioners are encountering day-to-day and can't resolve without bringing the right people together. For organizations new to Kaizen events, start with low-hanging fruit -- problems causing pain that are bounded enough to be addressed within an event. As the organization matures, take a more strategic approach to selecting which processes warrant events. And remember that not every problem needs an event -- A3 thinking, simpler PDCA cycles, or longer-term projects may be more appropriate depending on the problem's complexity.
How do you start a Lean consortium in another state?
The ILC was created using a Design for Lean Six Sigma process -- using a Lean tool to design a Lean organization. The process included voice-of-the-customer research with organizations across industries, benchmarking against established successful consortiums (including the Northwest High Performance Excellence Consortium in the Portland, Oregon area, which was an early influence), and a structured design event that distilled vague ideas into a concrete value proposition. Other states with similar consortiums include Michigan and Maryland. Teresa McMahon offers to share the ILC's original charter and design work with practitioners interested in starting consortiums in their own states.
What makes consortium-style learning work in some places but not others?
The hunger and need for high-quality, low-cost learning opportunities matters. In Iowa, member organizations had been sending people out of state for any significant Lean training. The ILC filled a real gap. In larger metro areas with more existing options, informal groups may struggle to maintain consistent participation. The session names two patterns that matter: every interaction should add genuine value to participants (the discipline of asking what each person needs from a meeting and what they can offer); and groups have to do what they say they will do (lack of follow-through is a leading cause of group failure).
How do you measure whether collaboration is working?
The most direct indicator is whether the improvement work in your organization accelerates as a result of the collaboration. Inputs (number of events attended, business cards collected, LinkedIn connections made) matter only insofar as they translate into changed practice. Stephanie's framing throughout the session: every interaction should produce at least one takeaway that can be applied back home. Collaboration without translation is inspiration without change.
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