Also, see the Chobani video mentioned in the webinar via the Big Change Agency website
Most Lean programs underdeliver. The numbers are uncomfortable enough that organizations rarely cite them publicly. McKinsey research that Benny Ausmus references in this session puts the failure rate of Six Sigma programs above 60%, the proportion of Lean implementations that fail to achieve expected value at 80%, and the proportion of programs that fail to hit their savings targets at 70%. Of the 80% Lean failure rate, 39% is attributed to employee resistance to change. Another 33% is attributed to management behavior that doesn't support the change. Together those two causes account for nearly three-quarters of the failure.
This is, as Benny puts it, the ultimate irony. Programs designed to reduce waste consume more waste than they save -- pulling employees into classrooms to learn tools they don't end up using to actually improve the business. The deeper problem is structural. Most Lean implementations follow a top-down logic: senior leaders decide to implement Lean, an internal or external team rolls out the methodology, and frontline employees are expected to adopt the new practices. The expected adoption rarely materializes, and the program quietly fades.
The corrective Benny and Simon describe in this session is a model for what they call employee-led and management-championed initiatives. The framing is deliberate. This isn't bottom-up. Bottom-up suggests that initiative originates at the frontline and pushes upward against management resistance, which rarely sustains itself. Employee-led describes a different dynamic -- leaders define the strategic direction and create the conditions for improvement, and employees own the work of identifying problems and implementing changes within that direction.
The session walks through their four-component model and uses the Chobani Australia engagement as an extended case study. The model is unusually portable: organizations can apply it as a diagnostic for their current improvement work and as a roadmap for what to strengthen.
Benny Ausmus is CEO and Lead Facilitator of BIG Change Agency, based in Melbourne, Australia, with offices in Jakarta, Indonesia. His background is in psychology and business coaching. He specializes in culture shaping, culture change, and driving employee engagement through leadership development at all levels of a business. He has worked with more than 100 business leaders, executives, and sales directors across organizations including Telstra, Commonwealth Bank, and EXA IT Solutions, and has delivered more than 150 training sessions and workshops.
Simon Murray is Program Director at BIG Change Agency, leading the firm's manufacturing team. His specialty is technical process improvement -- the operational side of the work that complements Benny's focus on people and culture. His background covers engineering, operational, and general management positions across industries from bricks to bread, and his approach applies to small family businesses and billion-dollar multinationals alike.
The session is hosted by Mark Graban, then VP of Improvement and Innovation Services at KaiNexus and the author of Lean Hospitals, Healthcare Kaizen, Measures of Success, and The Mistakes That Make Us.
The terminology matters. Benny is direct that employee-led is not a synonym for bottom-up. Employee-led initiatives have specific characteristics:
Leadership sponsorship and championing. Executives and senior managers are on board with the work. They're prepared to trust their employees, support small risks, and hand over decision-making authority for the work itself. This trust has to come from the top. Without it, the model fails before it starts.
Employees fully engaged and pushing for further initiatives. Employees at all levels are trained, encouraged, and coached to constantly bring forward fresh ideas and push leadership to support new improvement work. The pressure for improvement comes from the frontline, sustained by leadership's responsiveness.
Daily meetings and improvement projects led by employees, not supervisors. The structure of improvement work places frontline workers in the lead role for identifying problems and shaping solutions. Supervisors and managers support and facilitate; they don't direct.
Leadership opportunity at every level. Drawing on Simon Sinek's definition, leaders are people who take initiative to influence and impact change around them. In an employee-led culture, anyone can be a leader in their own area. The model isn't about formal hierarchy. It's about distributed initiative.
The shift Benny names is from a command-and-control management style to what BIG Change Agency calls trust and track. Trust the people. Track the results. Hold them accountable for outcomes through visible measures, not through micromanagement. The cultural change this requires is substantial -- most management practices have been built around command and control, and the muscles for trust and track have to be deliberately developed.
The session uses Chobani Australia as an extended worked example. The case is worth understanding because it illustrates how the four-component model operates in practice and produces measurable results.
Chobani Australia is the Australian operation of the U.S.-based yogurt company. The Australian business was established roughly five years before this session and had recently achieved the position of number-one yogurt brand in Australia -- a substantial achievement for a company that started from scratch. The growth had been rapid, and a leadership change brought new attention to the operational consequences.
The new management team identified several problems. The business focus had been entirely on growth, which wasn't sustainable. The management structure had become top-down and stretched. People on the floor had lost the ability to make decisions themselves. Supervisors were overburdened.
The objectives Chobani set when engaging BIG Change Agency were specific:
Align teams to common values and goals within the business. Chobani had strong values and vision, but not everyone in the business understood how those values translated to their individual jobs.
Embed a continuous improvement and Lean process in the day-to-day business. Existing Lean tools were applied occasionally when big problems hit, but daily work was just about getting product out the door.
Engage staff in driving improvement initiatives. The culture was generally positive -- people liked the brand and liked working at Chobani -- but they weren't yet engaged in improvement work.
Provide a sustainable coaching and training framework. The training that did happen was ad-hoc. The leadership wanted structure.
Support and accelerate strategic plans in an agile environment. The business was changing too fast for long-horizon strategic planning. Six-to-twelve-month strategic plans needed frontline teams that could adapt quickly.
Enable a culture where every employee understood continuous improvement as continuous, not as a program with a defined end.
The results, measured six months into the engagement when the case study video was filmed: average production line output increased 23%. Customer complaints reduced 50%. Capability was built among engaged frontline workers who were actually leading the improvement initiatives. By the time of the webinar at eighteen months into the engagement, the business had generated close to 500 improvement ideas in the previous three months alone, with about 300 completed and 200 still in progress.
The numbers matter, but the more important point is what produced them. The improvements that drove the production gains and the customer complaint reduction were largely identified and implemented by frontline workers, not by managers or external consultants. The leadership team had built the confidence to let frontline employees make changes they knew were right, often without requiring manager approval or significant capital investment. The vast majority of the gains came from communication and empowerment.
The first component of the four-part model is purpose. Purpose deals with environment, culture, vision, mission, values, and standards. It's qualitative and answers the question why -- why does this organization exist, what does it stand for, who do we want to become more of?
Purpose is the most commonly skipped component in improvement programs. Organizations launch Lean rollouts based on process and tool training without first doing the cultural alignment work that makes the tools land. The result is the failure pattern the McKinsey numbers describe. Simon names this directly: in his twenty years of operational improvement work, failure to define purpose first is consistent across every failed Lean program he's seen.
Purpose work has specific characteristics:
Vision, mission, values, and standards. Where are we going? How will we get there? How will we behave on the way? What are the unbreakable rules that apply to everyone, that if followed consistently would deliver the vision?
Big important goals. Not metrics. Goals at the level of strategic intent that anchor the more granular work that follows.
Common language. The cultural anchoring shows up in how people talk to each other. The vision and values aren't just on the wall -- they're in the everyday conversation.
The work of building purpose has to be facilitated, not dictated. Benny is direct about this: there's no point pulling everyone together and announcing what the purpose will be. The engagement comes from people developing the purpose together, which means sharing ideas, talking about what's most important, naming who they want to be more of as an organization.
The Chobani Manifesto Benny describes in the session illustrates how this works. The manifesto was crafted across two three-hour sessions plus a follow-up. The first session brought together about a dozen frontline workers and about a dozen managers. They worked through what was most important to them, what behaviors they wanted to see, what attitudes they wanted more of. The ideas went up on a whiteboard. Themes and patterns emerged. A list of statements was developed.
The second session brought in all the frontline operators from every area available at that time. They saw what others had come up with, tweaked it, put their own spin on it, agreed or disagreed with specific items. The list changed slightly. A final session brought everyone else through, gave them input, and finalized the document.
Total time across the sessions: approximately six to seven hours. The output was a manifesto that lived in daily use. Every day, the team picked an item off the manifesto and used it as fuel for a story or conversation at their stand-up meetings. The document wasn't decoration. It was operational.
Simon adds an important point about how to approach work like this. People often think exercises like the manifesto will be huge and take forever. The flaw is the assumption that the document has to be perfect. It doesn't. The manifesto is a changing dynamic document that doesn't have to be the same forever. At Chobani, 20% of the workforce at the time of the webinar had been with the business less than six or seven months -- people who hadn't been part of the original manifesto sessions. The plan was to revisit the manifesto in the coming months and refresh it based on who was now in the business. The right horizon for purpose work isn't "this will last three to five years." It's "this is what we need for the next six to twelve months."
The second component is process -- the structure of communication and activities that enables collaboration and momentum. Process is quantitative. It's the systems and routines that hold the improvement work together day to day. Best practice. Benchmarks. Gold standards.
Simon offers a useful analogy. If the purpose work is like the first week of the season for a sports team -- everyone rallying together with shared intent -- then process is the training schedule, the diet, the play frequency. Without the training structure, the team can't win regardless of how motivated they are. Process gives the organization the structure to actually keep the momentum of an employee-led improvement program working.
Key process elements:
The daily stand-up meeting. The foundation. The simple question driving each stand-up: how can we make today better than yesterday? Even people who fight against improvement and change can engage with that question when it's asked daily in a small group. The daily structure surfaces ideas that would otherwise stay in people's heads, and it gives leaders regular access to the operational reality that gets obscured in weekly or monthly reviews.
Improvement teams. Specific groups working on specific problems, but the problems are identified by the floor, not by management. When the morning meeting surfaces an issue, the supervisor or manager rallies an improvement team around it -- bringing together frontline workers and facilitating the work of fixing the problem. The people who raised the issue are involved in solving it.
Frontline empowerment. Many of the problems identified don't need an improvement team at all. They need a frontline worker who's empowered to make the change. At Chobani, the leadership team built the confidence to let frontline workers make changes they knew were right without requiring approval. The vast majority of the gains came from this empowerment.
Cross-functional teams. Teams that bring together people from different areas to break down silos. Two forms: project-based cross-functional teams (a production worker, a maintenance person, someone from procurement working together on a specific issue) and ongoing champion teams (cultural ambassadors for each area, stand-up meeting champions who run morning meetings across the business and meet weekly to share learning).
Benny names where process work fits in the puzzle: process is the work of consulting -- identifying from different industries and businesses what the best practice structure would be for the specific organization, and adapting it. Purpose was facilitated. Process is consulted.
The third component is performance -- the how and the do. How does the day-to-day activity of each person fit into the process for the purpose? Performance is where the work actually happens, measured through real-time KPIs that tell people whether they had a good day.
Simon extends the sports team analogy. Purpose set the team and the goal. Process built the training schedule. Performance is about keeping everyone motivated for the entire season. The season in continuous improvement lasts forever, which means the motivation has to be sustained continuously, not just through the early enthusiasm of a new program.
Performance work centers on measures and KPIs. The big important goals defined in purpose flow down to each department's metrics through a process similar to hoshin kanri. But Simon names a specific challenge with traditional hoshin cascading: when only the business KPIs are visible to frontline workers, it's difficult to sustain engagement. The metrics feel disconnected from what frontline workers can actually influence.
The Result KPI and Action KPI reframe addresses this. Rather than the traditional lead-lag terminology, BIG Change Agency uses simpler language:
Result KPI. What happened yesterday. The line rate, the quality complaints, the safety performance. The outcome of yesterday's work. If the result is red, the team needs to understand why and work out how to improve.
Action KPI. What action will you take today to drive a better result. The lead measure stated in plain language.
The reframe matters operationally. In manufacturing environments where English may be a second or third language and education levels vary significantly, the concept of lead and lag indicators can be hard to grasp. Result and Action are concrete. The words say what the things are. Workers can engage with the question "what action will you take today" in a way they can't always engage with "what is your leading indicator."
The visual management infrastructure that holds the performance work has two layers at Chobani. At the daily stand-up boards, everything is paper-based -- KPIs and results handwritten on visible boards, cascading from frontline through every level up to the senior leadership team's daily stand-up. For tracking ideas at scale, technology supports the visibility -- in this case the KaiNexus platform, which holds the close to 500 improvement ideas generated in three months and makes them accessible to anyone in the business.
The summary Simon offers: performance is about everyone having a game they can win. Where is the team on the league table? How did we perform this week? How are we going to perform in training today? That's the type of discussion that happens every day around performance.
Benny names where performance work fits in the puzzle: performance is implemented through formal training. People need to be educated in how to use numbers and metrics for improvement, how to set meaningful KPIs, how to read the visual boards, how to act on what they see.
The fourth and final component is people -- the who. Mindset, beliefs, values, decisions, attitudes. The human element that sits underneath everything else.
People work is most effective when delivered in the framework of the broader environment. Once the purpose is in place, the process is established, and the performance training is happening, the people work becomes the work of helping individuals figure out their best behavior, choose their attitude, develop their leadership capabilities, and align with the broader culture.
This is coaching work, not directive work. Benny describes it as using questions from the framework to help people figure out where they align and where their gaps are. The engagement happens when people are aligned with the shared sense of purpose. When a person's personality doesn't match the company's culture, one of two things is true -- either the company has its purpose and values wrong (or hasn't communicated them clearly), or the person isn't suited for the company or role.
People work has a useful diagnostic Benny offers in the session. A common complaint from organizations is that it's hard to get good people -- if only they could recruit better, the work would be easier. The first question to ask in response is: tell me about your culture and purpose and environment. Then: tell me about your processes and systems. Then: tell me about your training and how you champion performance. Only after working through those three questions is it appropriate to look at people as the constraint.
Most of the time, what looks like a people problem is actually a purpose problem, a process problem, or a performance problem in disguise. The framework lets organizations diagnose where the actual constraint lies before reaching for the easy explanation of "we have the wrong people."
People work is the work of coaching. Where purpose is facilitated, process is consulted, performance is trained, people is coached.
The four components don't function as separate workstreams. Benny is direct that the model is a puzzle, and the puzzle pieces have to align at the edges for the work to be sustainable.
The critical alignments:
Purpose to people. The shared sense of who the organization wants to become has to match the mindset of the people doing the work. A purpose without people who share it stays aspirational. A people focus without purpose alignment produces individual engagement without organizational direction.
Process to performance. The systems and routines of the process have to match the day-to-day activities of performance. A process that doesn't connect to what people actually do day-to-day is theater. A performance focus without process structure produces individual heroics without sustained momentum.
The two diagonal alignments matter too. Purpose has to support the process, not undermine it. People have to engage with the performance work, not see it as imposed.
The integration insight Benny offers at the close of the session is that each component exists in all the components. The culture conversation has to be baked into the daily process. The performance discussion happens within the cultural conversation. The coaching of people threads through the structured improvement work. None of the components can be treated as set-and-forget. All four require ongoing attention.
The diagnostic value of the model is that it lets organizations look at improvement challenges with clear eyes. When something isn't working, the question becomes: is this a cultural problem, a process problem, a performance problem, or a people problem? Most organizations default to "this is a people and personality problem," and most of the time that diagnosis is wrong. The model lets organizations find the actual constraint.
One of the practical questions Simon and Benny address in the Q&A deserves to be pulled out because it gets at a real operational challenge.
A participant asks how to create time for coaching and training when regular work is already consuming all available time. The answer is two-part.
Benny's framing: don't trade on time -- trade on value. The ultimate irony of inefficient improvement programs is that they take time without producing value. The way to earn more time is to demonstrate value quickly. Every session has to have a tangible output -- some measurable improvement that justifies the time investment and earns the next session.
Simon's framing addresses a specific failure mode in Lean implementation: training people in tools and then sending them out to find a problem the tool might solve. The right sequence is the reverse. The problem must come first. If the organization has an issue with changeovers, identify the problem first, then train the people in quick changeover. Never train people in quick changeover and then send them out to look for changeover problems.
The principle applies generally. Tools without problems they're solving consume time without producing value. Problems without the right tools produce frustration. The match between problem and tool is what produces the value that earns the next round of investment.
The connection between the four-component model and the KaiNexus platform is direct because Chobani Australia used the platform to manage the scale of improvement activity their employee-led initiative generated.
The fundamental challenge Chobani faced: when an employee-led model is working, the volume of ideas grows quickly. Chobani generated close to 500 improvement ideas in three months. Tracking that volume in spreadsheets or on paper alone isn't feasible. The platform provided the infrastructure to capture, route, track, and measure ideas at the volume the engaged workforce was producing.
The platform supported each of the four components specifically:
Purpose visibility. The strategic priorities and shared direction can be made visible across the organization, with improvement work tagged to the priorities it serves. The connection between daily improvement and strategic direction is operational, not just aspirational.
Process structure. The daily stand-up boards remain paper-based in the Chobani model, but the broader improvement work flows through the platform. Routing, notifications, ownership, escalation paths -- all of the workflow infrastructure that keeps ideas from disappearing is held in the system.
Performance measurement. The platform tracks the impact of each improvement -- the time saved, the quality improvement, the financial impact. Aggregated performance metrics let leaders see at a glance how the program is performing and where the leverage points are.
People engagement. Ideas captured in the platform get acknowledged, routed, and responded to in a way that signals to the person who raised the idea that their contribution mattered. The visible status of each idea -- where it is in the workflow, who owns it, what's happening with it -- closes the feedback loop that traditional suggestion box approaches break.
The integration Simon describes is what makes the platform credible for an employee-led model. Without it, the volume of activity an engaged workforce generates would overwhelm any manual tracking system. With it, the activity stays visible, measurable, and connected to results.
None of this substitutes for the cultural work Benny and Simon describe. The platform doesn't create the engagement. Leadership behavior, facilitated purpose work, daily stand-up discipline, and coaching practice are what create the engagement. The platform supports the infrastructure on which the practice operates. The practice produces the results.
Benny Ausmus is CEO and Lead Facilitator of BIG Change Agency, based in Melbourne, Australia, with offices in Jakarta, Indonesia. With a background in psychology and business coaching, he has assisted more than 100 business leaders, executives, and sales directors in shaping their organizations' inner workings and operational environments. He specializes in culture shaping, culture change, and driving employee engagement through leadership development at all levels of a business. He has worked as a business trainer and facilitator for national and international organizations including Telstra, Commonwealth Bank, and EXA IT Solutions, and has delivered more than 150 training sessions and workshops.
Simon Murray is Program Director at BIG Change Agency, leading the firm's manufacturing team. A natural process improvement specialist, his experience covers industries from bricks to bread, and his approach applies to small family businesses and billion-dollar multinationals alike. His background spans engineering, operational, and general management positions. He focuses on developing and improving systems that eliminate waste in all its forms, with a particular emphasis on engaging frontline workers as the source of improvement insight.
What's the difference between employee-led and bottom-up?
Bottom-up suggests that initiative originates at the frontline and pushes upward against management resistance, which rarely sustains itself. Employee-led describes a different dynamic. Leadership defines the strategic direction and creates the conditions for improvement. Employees own the work of identifying problems and implementing changes within that direction. The leadership sponsorship is what distinguishes employee-led from bottom-up. Without it, frontline initiative gets blocked by structures that weren't designed to support employee-driven change.
What are the four components of the model?
Purpose (the why -- vision, mission, values, environment, culture). Process (the what -- the structure of communication, daily stand-ups, improvement teams, cross-functional teams). Performance (the how -- KPIs, training, visual management, daily measurement). People (the who -- mindset, beliefs, leadership development, coaching). The four components must be aligned at the edges and integrated so that each component exists in all the others. Most improvement programs work on one or two components and skip the others, which produces the failure patterns most organizations recognize.
Why does purpose come first?
Because process implemented without purpose alignment will be rejected by the culture. The McKinsey research Benny references puts employee resistance at 39% of Lean failure causes -- the largest single factor. Resistance happens when people don't understand why the change is being made or how it connects to what they care about. Purpose work, done properly through facilitation rather than dictation, builds the shared understanding that lets the process work that follows actually land. Organizations that skip purpose and start with process find their tools rejected by the culture and their training time wasted.
What is the Chobani Manifesto and how was it created?
A document developed by frontline workers and managers at Chobani Australia that captured the behaviors, attitudes, and values the team wanted to see in the business. It was created across two three-hour sessions (about a dozen frontline workers and a dozen managers in the first, all available frontline operators in the second) plus a final iteration session, for roughly six to seven hours of total time. The output became operational -- used daily as fuel for stand-up meeting conversations and stories. The manifesto isn't permanent. The plan was to revisit it as the workforce changed, recognizing that 20% of the team at the time of the webinar had joined within the previous six or seven months and hadn't been part of the original sessions.
What's the difference between a Result KPI and an Action KPI?
A Result KPI is what happened yesterday -- line rates, quality complaints, safety performance. An Action KPI is what action you'll take today to drive a better result. The terminology replaces the more traditional "lead" and "lag" indicators. In environments where English may be a second or third language or where education levels vary, the lead-lag concept is harder to grasp than result-action. The plain-language version is more operational. People can engage with "what will you do today" in a way they can't always engage with "what is your leading indicator."
Why is "trade on value, not time" important for training in improvement programs?
Because the most common reason organizations can't find time for coaching and training is that the previous training didn't produce value. Programs that consume time without demonstrating measurable improvement earn no claim on future time. The way to create time for training is to produce visible value quickly -- to ensure every session has a tangible output that justifies the time investment and earns the next session. The corollary, from Simon, is that training should follow problem identification, not precede it. Train people in the tool that solves the specific problem they have, not in the tool you think they should learn so they can find problems to apply it to.
What's the right size for a champion network in an employee-led initiative?
The champion structure depends on the size of the organization, but the principle is consistent. Champions should be small cross-functional groups that meet regularly to share learning and support each other. At Chobani, the champion structure included cultural ambassadors (one for each area, supporting the daily cultural conversation) and stand-up meeting champions (frontline workers who run the daily morning meetings and meet weekly across areas to share learning). The champions don't replace the broader frontline workforce -- they support and accelerate it. The right way to identify champions is to share the purpose passionately, ask who wants to be involved, and pay attention to who raises their hand voluntarily. If you ask the question and get crickets, that's a diagnostic signal that something is wrong with the culture or the message.
What if employees want to bring ideas but don't want to be involved in implementing them?
Ask why. Often there's an underlying reason. They may have tried to implement an idea in the past and been burned. They may not have had managerial support when they tried previously. They may genuinely not have the time or capacity. The underlying reason matters because the response depends on what's actually driving the reluctance. Sometimes the right response is concierge treatment -- a one-on-one conversation with the supervisor offering specific help to make the implementation possible. Sometimes the right response is to accept that some employees will be idea generators and others will be implementers, and to structure the process so both contributions are valued. The wrong response is to make implementation mandatory and lose ideas as a result. The right response respects the underlying cause and creates conditions where the contribution that's possible can actually happen.
What's the diagnostic value of the four-component model?
When something isn't working in an improvement program, the model lets you ask: is this a purpose problem, a process problem, a performance problem, or a people problem? Most organizations default to "people problem" as the explanation for whatever isn't working, and most of the time that diagnosis is wrong. The model forces a more honest analysis. The complaint that "we can't find good people" usually turns out to be a purpose problem (the culture isn't clear), a process problem (the systems don't support people), or a performance problem (the training isn't structured). Only after working through the other three components is it appropriate to conclude that the constraint is actually about people.
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