KaiNexus CEO and co-founder Greg Jacobson joins host Mark Graban for the twenty-third episode of the Ask Us Anything series, the recurring session built around questions from webinar attendees. The questions in this batch all sit close to the same problem. CI leaders want to know how their culture is actually doing, not in a once-a-year survey but in something closer to real time. They want to know how to revive enthusiasm that has quietly leaked out of a program that once ran hot. And they want to know whether culture change in a professional services firm needs all the partners on board before it can really start. The honest answers, as usual, are messier than the framing of the question suggests.
Here is what the episode covers and the thinking behind each answer.
A reader named Susan asked how to measure culture. Greg pointed to Seth Godin's definition: "People like us do things like this." If that is what culture is, then the way to measure it is by measuring the things people actually do. You can measure satisfaction in a survey. You can measure opinions. But to understand a culture, you measure action. For a continuous improvement culture specifically, that means the number of improvements an organization does, and how often they do them, and who's involved.
Mark connected the question to a related one from a reader named Colin about measures of CI maturity. He'd look at the number of improvements being implemented, the percentage of employees involved in implementing them, and the average lead time from initial idea to first completed PDSA cycle. But he caught the bigger framing problem first. Culture is broad and vague the way health is broad and vague. There is no culture score that works like a credit score. There are specific aspects you can choose to measure, on a more real-time basis than waiting for an annual survey, but you have to choose them.
Greg added a useful frame from a recent Friday morning musing at KaiNexus: improvement work, like any work, runs on prioritization, execution, and time management. Prioritization makes sure you are working on the right thing. Execution, through a method like DMAIC or A3 or PDSA, makes sure you arrive at a better state. Time management makes sure you actually finish. Apply those three to improvement and you have a workable framework for thinking about whether the practice itself is healthy.
The other half of Colin's question asked what quick wins he could suggest for embedding continuous improvement. Mark separated two patterns here. For the big things, where time and resources are constrained, prioritization matters. But there is also a school of thought that says all the small improvements do not need to be prioritized at all. You want people participating and doing many small improvements.
The quick win that actually works is small Kaizen wins in one department. Pick one. Coach its leaders to facilitate and collaborate with employees on small, fast improvements. Run them in a way where employees see continuous improvement as benefiting them directly. That draws them in, builds momentum, and gives you something to spread from. Mary Greeley Medical Center, a KaiNexus customer, took exactly this approach and built a culture by spreading small wins out from one pilot. Greg's add was about the value of constraint. You do not need extensive expertise to do quick wins, and you do not need to do them everywhere. Pick a pocket with an open-minded local leader, cycle through as many small low-cost low-risk improvements as you can, and the wheel starts turning. Improvement experts can layer in more sophisticated problem solving over time as the habit forms.
A reader named Mech wrote in with an honest question. The workforce had been engaged in improvement, people had been excited about the impact, and now it was visibly fading. What could be done to bring the engaged atmosphere back? Colin's question included a related piece: how do you sustain culture change?
Mark's first read was that a lot of this depends on ongoing leader behavior. If leaders started by enthusiastically asking for ideas and helping people test them, and then leaders lost the enthusiasm themselves, it is natural for employees to follow. The countermeasure starts with conversation. Go talk to people, find out why the energy is gone, and diagnose from there. Greg's first thought reading the question was that there is almost certainly a leadership change behind it, or a series of them, or a shift in leadership behavior. The fitness analogy he reached for is exact. You spent six months changing habits, you got in shape, your vital signs are better, and then you stopped working out because you thought you were done. The continuous improvement culture works the same way. Entropy is the natural state. Leaders have to keep beating the drum, keep re-focusing attention, keep doing the work themselves. Without that, the culture quietly slides back.
Greg added the gemba habit. Go ask people. Six months ago you were jazzed, now you are not. What changed? It might be something simple, a board that got moved, a feature that changed, a small barrier nobody flagged. It might be something deeper, like a new leader who does not understand what the team is doing and has quietly stopped supporting it. Either way, you find it by asking.
A reader named Mark asked how culture change starts in professional services organizations, like law firms and accounting practices, where real silos and predominant subcultures within those silos make change harder. The implicit question was whether change has to start with one partner or all of them at once.
Mark Graban's first instinct was about leading by doing. He had recently heard from a colleague who stopped trying to get buy-in for process behavior charts through conversation and started just making them. She led by doing, let people see the alternative, and watched people gravitate to the approach in a way they would not have through pitch decks and theory. Greg's instinct started in the same direction but flip-flopped as he thought it through. If you had one unit of energy to spend, would you spend it convincing the other partners or doing the work with the people who already report to you? The right answer probably depends on the partners. If they are likely to be persuaded by data and a working model, do the work and share the results. If you know they would be quickly on board, spend the time with them. Either way, leading by example tends to be a stronger first move than evangelism.
There is a connected point worth drawing out. The Skinners, lawyers who presented a Lean-in-legal-practice webinar for KaiNexus, made the case that legal work breaks down into widgets the same way other work does. There is standard work in any professional services environment, even where the standard work has not been named or defined yet. If a recurring meeting produces no value, that is waste. If a process produces a deliverable that no one uses, that is waste. The same diagnostic tools work. The same question, what is the value, what is the waste, applies.
The closing question asked how the market has changed since KaiNexus entered commercially in 2011: the willingness to adopt technology, the acceptance of Lean or Kaizen by upper management, and the industries now embracing or exploring Kaizen.
Greg's read on technology adoption is that acceptance has risen substantially, with the caveat that his sample is biased. People who reach out to KaiNexus have already largely accepted that technology has to be part of the answer. But the broader shift is real. The recognition that paper and bulletin boards and spreadsheets are all technologies, just less effective ones than purpose-built platforms, is more common now than it was a decade ago.
Greg's healthcare-specific observation was striking. When he started doing this work in the mid-2000s, hospital colleagues looked at him with confusion when he tried to describe what continuous improvement could do for healthcare. The deer-in-headlights look was the typical response. Years later, joining a hospital as an ER doctor, his new-employee orientation spent an entire hour out of six on the organization's Six Sigma and Lean program. The change is generational. Today he does not see a healthcare organization without some flavor of quality improvement, process improvement, or operational excellence function. Whether they are doing it well is a different question, but the field has changed.
Mark added the role of leadership in the gap that remains. The failure mode he still sees most is executives who treat Lean as something for educating the staff while not embracing it themselves. The counterexample he pointed to was Dr. Gary Kaplan at Virginia Mason Medical Center, who has personally led the organization's adoption of what they describe as the Toyota Production System for nearly two decades. That kind of executive leadership, where the CEO is not a spectator, is still the difference between organizations that build a real culture and organizations that run a program.
On the industries embracing this work, the answer keeps widening. Manufacturing and healthcare are no-brainers. Logistics has been there for a while. More recent additions to the KaiNexus customer base include oil and gas companies and government entities, both of which Greg sees as relatively new for the platform. The frontier he is still watching is education. There is a continuous improvement movement in K-12 and higher education, including work from the Carnegie Foundation, but most of it has not yet reached the maturity of using a management platform to support it at scale.
Ask Us Anything is a recurring series of short sessions answering questions from KaiNexus webinar attendees. It is hosted by Mark Graban, VP of Improvement and Innovation Services at KaiNexus, with Greg Jacobson, the company's CEO and co-founder, and occasional guest hosts from the KaiNexus team.
See every episode in the series on the Ask Us Anything main page. Earlier episodes are also available on the KaiNexus YouTube channel and in the KaiNexus podcast archive.
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