Michael Lombard opened the webinar with a claim that does a lot of work for the rest of the session. All ideas are not created equal.
The point isn't about the size of the result. The point is about the way an organization approaches improvement. Two organizations can pursue the same improvement objective — say, reducing a process cycle time by 30 percent — and produce wildly different long-term impact depending on how the work was done. The result on the process matters. So does what the process of improvement itself produced in the people doing the work.
Michael laid out three scenarios on a chart. The horizontal axis was the intensity of investment in developing people. The vertical axis was overall organizational impact.
The red scenario: a vendor walks in, prescribes a technological solution to an issue, implements it, and walks out. Process improvement happens. The organization gets the result. But the staff didn't participate in producing it. Nothing about how the organization thinks or operates has changed. The impact is bounded by the immediate result.
The yellow scenario: the organization engages staff through a quality circle, a rapid improvement event, or a kaizen event. The participants are involved. The team-building benefits accrue. The esprit de corps from working on a real problem together is real. Engagement adds to the impact. But once the event ends, the organization mostly returns to business as usual — with a bit more bounce in its step, but without fundamentally different capability.
The green scenario: the improvement is approached in a way that intensely develops people. The participants don't just solve the problem in front of them. They develop new mindsets, new habits, new ways of thinking about future problems. The cognitive science behind habit formation and neuroplasticity is doing the heavy lifting here. The result is dramatically larger long-term impact because the people who emerge from the improvement work are now equipped to lead the next round of improvement with stronger reflexes.
Michael's contention through the rest of the session: the green scenario is what traditional kaizen, done well, produces. Toyota Kata also produces it. Both together produce more than either alone.
That framing set up the rest of the hour.
Michael Lombard is a continuous improvement leader and practitioner with deep experience applying Kaizen and Toyota Kata in complex organizations, particularly healthcare settings. His background includes coaching frontline staff, supervisors, managers, and directors through the practice of improvement and coaching kata. He has experimented with how the kata approach integrates with kaizen, A3 thinking, strategy deployment, daily management systems, and traditional project management. His perspective draws from years of practice as both a coach and a learner working through the discipline of scientific thinking applied to operational improvement.
Mark Graban hosted the session and provided the kaizen framing portion. Mark is the author of "Lean Hospitals" and co-author of "Healthcare Kaizen" with Joe Swartz.
Mark stepped in to cover the kaizen foundation before Michael moved into the kata material.
Kaizen is a Japanese word that translates literally as "good change" or "change for the better." Mark and Joe Swartz have both written extensively on the topic. A few principles stand out as foundational.
The goal is engaging everyone in improvement. Joe's organization, Franciscan Saint Francis Health in Indianapolis, has reached close to 50 percent participation rates of employees submitting, implementing, and documenting at least one kaizen per year. Cumulatively, about two-thirds of employees have participated at least once. The leadership challenge is continually to expand that participation — not to hit a target, but to make daily improvement part of how the organization works. The cultural marker that signals success is when people start pointing out problems openly because doing so is celebrated rather than punished or covered up.
The distinction between a kaizen system and a traditional suggestion box matters. Suggestion boxes ask people for ideas about things other people will implement, and leaders approve or reject ideas without further involvement from the person who submitted. A kaizen process starts with defining a problem or opportunity for improvement, and then follows the PDSA cycle — Plan, Do, Study, Adjust — through to a tested change. The person who identified the opportunity is involved in working through it. The follow-through is what separates a kaizen culture from a suggestion-box culture.
Leadership behavior is the determining factor. How leaders react when employees speak up. Whether they collaborate with people or take over their work. Whether they coach the practice of improvement or simply demand results. The drive and energy that comes from leaders at all levels is what makes any of the rest of it work.
Michael moved into the kata material with a useful framing. Toyota Kata, the book by Mike Rother from the University of Michigan, came out of years of studying how organizations like Toyota develop people on the front lines to lead improvement in a methodical, scientific manner — and how they develop coaches to teach those principles to others.
Michael's working summary of kata is short. Kata is the scientific method with two things added: direction and deliberate practice.
The direction comes from the kata practitioner constantly working backward from a long-term vision. What's the direction we're headed? What's the challenge we're trying to achieve in the next six months to a year or two? What's the target condition we want to be at in the next couple of weeks or a couple of months? What's the next obstacle we need to tackle? PDCA is the engine. The direction is what keeps the engine pointed at something that matters.
The deliberate practice piece is the part that separates kata from other improvement methodologies. Michael was explicit that the improvement kata isn't just another process improvement technique like DMAIC. It's not in the toolbox category. It's designed to create new habits, new ways of thinking, new mental muscle memory — and the process improvement results are almost a byproduct of the cognitive change. The kata is something you do, not something you deploy.
The improvement kata has four routines. None of them is fancy. The repetition is the point.
First: understand the direction or challenge. There's a real skill to this. Most organizations and most individuals start out poor at it. The more you practice the routine, the more strategic you start to think.
Second: grasp the current condition. The novel piece in the kata approach is that grasping the current condition is itself treated as a series of small experiments. Going to gemba to observe a process or collect data is approached as a PDCA cycle. The grasp is empirical and action-oriented rather than analytical and detached.
Third: establish the next target condition. The bite of the apple. Where do we want to be in the next few weeks or month or two? The act of consensus-building around that target condition is itself an experiment. Defining the target is part of the practice.
Fourth: iterate toward the target condition. Once the target is set, a series of obstacles will stand between current state and target state. The team navigates through them through rapid cycles of PDCA. Not 30-, 60-, or 90-day pilots. 30-, 60-, or 90-minute cycles. The cadence is the discipline.
Michael introduced one of the more useful concepts from the kata practice — the gray zone. The space between current condition and target condition isn't a planned path. Kata practitioners don't assume they know the right way to get from here to there. They relish the gray zone because that's the learning zone. Side trips happen. Wrong directions happen for a cycle or two. The iteration is what produces the path. The willingness to live in uncertainty is what produces the development.
Mark interjected here with a useful parallel from Ronald Heifetz's work at Harvard on technical change versus adaptive change. Technical changes have known steps that can be planned in advance — swapping out a hard drive in a computer is technical. Adaptive changes are more complex and require iterating through the change as understanding develops. Heifetz's point: organizations consistently err by treating adaptive challenges as if they were technical ones. Michael's response was that Heifetz's framing captures exactly what kata is trying to develop — the mindset for navigating through adaptive change in the gray zone, rather than forcing every challenge into a known plan.
While the learner practices the improvement kata, the coach practices the coaching kata. The coach plans coaching cycles and executes them. The more the coach does this, the more they start to realize that every step they take as a coach is itself an experiment — not just facilitating the learner's process improvement, but honing the coach's own craft. The scientific method becomes recursive. Everyone is practicing it at every level. The cultural shift that produces is substantial.
Every step is an experiment, whether you're in the role of learner or in the role of coach. Michael's phrasing for what this does to the brain is concrete: it's like your brain lifting weights, developing mental muscle memory through deliberate repetition, rewiring neural pathways through the practice itself. The cognitive science is real. The book "Toyota Kata" makes the explicit case. The brain changes through this kind of practice in ways that ordinary training does not produce.
Michael's view, after several years of practice, is that kaizen and kata aren't competing methodologies. They aren't even merely complementary. They're symbiotic.
Kata reinforces kaizen. Kaizen is based on the scientific method. PDCA cycles work better when the people running them have strong scientific thinking habits. Kata's design is explicitly to develop those scientific thinkers through deliberate practice. An organization that practices kata will also do kaizen better, because the people doing kaizen are stronger at the underlying thinking.
The coaching dimension reinforces too. When you first start coaching kaizen, you'll make mistakes. You'll ask too many questions or not enough. You'll ask leading questions. You'll be manipulative without meaning to. You'll struggle to find the Socratic stance that develops the learner. The coaching kata gives you a framework for getting better at coaching by treating every coaching cycle as an experiment. The improvement compounds.
Kata also gives kaizen efforts a sense of direction. The improvement kata's first routine — understanding the direction or challenge — embeds strategic thinking into the practice. Even if an organization doesn't have a mature strategy deployment system, kata practice creates a small amount of direction and alignment that pulls kaizen toward bigger challenges rather than letting it drift into point kaizen (isolated improvements without strategic context).
Kaizen enables kata. Michael flipped the relationship. When he tried to introduce kata into organizations that didn't have a kaizen-aligned culture, the practice struggled. Cultures that only care about results — "what did you do to improve cost, what did you do to improve efficiency" — don't make space for words like experimentation and learning. The rapid cycle of trying, failing, learning, and trying again requires permission. Kaizen cultures already grant that permission. The fertile ground for kata is a culture that has internalized kaizen principles.
Both methods are based on the scientific method. If you already have a kaizen framework working in your organization, you don't need to dismantle it to practice kata. Kata principles plug into existing kaizen routines. The morning huddle reviewing the idea board can include a brief discussion of target condition and direction. The PDCA cycles can be tightened. The coaching can improve. The integration is incremental.
Mark added two practical points to round out this section. Kaizen is also a learn-by-doing practice — at some point you have to dive in, and ideally with someone coaching you. Leaders and employees will make mistakes. The environment has to be one where mistakes during honest attempts at improvement aren't punished, because the fear of mistakes will produce paralysis and the improvement work won't happen. The role of the leader-as-coach is to prevent wildly irresponsible actions without becoming bureaucratic and slow, which is the suggestion-box failure mode.
Mark's second point: you can get better as a coach without formal kata practice. Doing kaizen every day, engaging with your team, treating every coaching cycle as an experiment, and consistently honing your craft will produce growth. Adding kata to that practice can speed up the development. But the underlying habit of treating coaching as a learning practice is what matters, with or without the formal kata framework.
Michael walked through two concrete examples from hospital settings to make the abstract principles operational.
The hospital had implemented barcode medication verification technology — scanners and armbands designed to improve patient safety by verifying the right medication was being given to the right patient. The technology had been in place for some time but wasn't being properly utilized. A nursing manager wanted to improve compliance.
The red approach: have the technology vendor come in with an audit checklist, mandate additional training, and call it done. Compliance would have improved. The development of people would not have.
The yellow approach: form a unit-based council, brainstorm the top ten ideas for improving compliance, prioritize them using dot-voting, and implement the best ones. Some improvement would have happened. Staff would have felt some ownership.
The green approach: the nursing manager practiced the improvement kata while Michael practiced the coaching kata. Michael was honest that this was early in his coaching practice and they made plenty of mistakes. The early cycles produced superficial solutions like "more training for staff" and "more auditing" — the same things the red and yellow approaches would have produced.
But by running cycle after cycle and watching what didn't work, the nursing manager started to develop a new reflex. The reflex was to take another step rather than assume an answer. When in doubt, go to gemba, do another PDCA cycle, see what you learn. After many cycles, the root cause turned out to be that the armbands were washing out — a materials management and purchasing issue rather than a training or compliance issue. The fix was straightforward once the cause was visible. Patient safety improved.
The patient safety improvement was important. The more durable result was what happened to the nursing manager. He developed a mental muscle memory for taking the next step rather than guessing. That capability transferred to every subsequent problem he tackled. The process improvement was real. The capability development was bigger.
The hospital used patient room whiteboards as a visual communication tool — letting nurses, doctors, the patient, and family stay aligned on plan of care, expected discharge date, and other relevant information. The boards weren't being used effectively. Visual communication was poor.
A frontline clinical primary nurse wanted to tackle this. He had never led improvement work before. Michael had never coached a frontline clinical staff member through the coaching kata before — his prior work had been with supervisors, managers, and directors. The pairing was new territory for both of them.
The red approach: research the Studer Group's evidence-based work on patient whiteboards, disseminate the model, and audit against the principles. Knowledge would have transferred. Some improvement would have happened. The learning cycle would not have been the developmental experience.
The yellow approach: another unit-based council, possibly a kaizen event, with engagement from physicians and patient families. The participation would have been meaningful. The development would have been moderate.
The green approach: the primary nurse practiced the improvement kata. The early obstacles were small. The markers on the boards kept going dry. The boards were hard to erase. These were unglamorous problems, but cycle after cycle of working on them sent a message to the staff that the manager wasn't going to assume the issue was about education and accountability. The system was being made easier rather than the people being blamed.
Then bigger issues emerged. The nurse and the doctor weren't rounding together, which meant they weren't using the board collaboratively, which meant the board often went unused. That's a more complex, more political problem. But the cycles continued. The nurse got stronger. He started to see how empirical root cause analysis — doing one more PDCA cycle rather than speculating — could surface causes that traditional analysis would miss. Michael started to learn how to coach frontline nurses and physicians, which he hadn't done before. Both sides developed.
The improvement was real. The development was the larger story.
Michael shifted to how the kata practice integrates with the platform itself. The integration is direct.
KaiNexus was built with kaizen principles baked in. Greg Jacobson, the founder, based much of the design on Masaaki Imai's book "Gemba Kaizen." The kaizen orientation is in the platform's bones.
The Opportunity for Improvement (OI) record in KaiNexus has, traditionally, a description box (where the problem is captured) and a proposed solution box (where the proposed solution is captured). Michael started experimenting with a small reframe. The proposed solution box becomes the target condition. The description box stays as the current condition. The OI tasks panel on the bottom right becomes the iteration space — the rapid PDCA cycles aimed at eliminating obstacles on the way to the target condition.
In that frame, the overall OI record represents the pursuit of a target condition over the course of a few weeks to a few months. The tasks panel represents the daily iteration that removes obstacles along the way. The platform supports the kata practice without modification — just a different way of thinking about what each field captures.
The integration matters because kata practice produces volume. A learner running 30- to 90-minute PDCA cycles will produce many small experiments. Tracking those experiments in a system that holds them, makes them visible, and surfaces progress is what keeps the practice from becoming overwhelming. The infrastructure carries the load that the discipline produces.
Michael's broader argument was that kata principles plug into whatever improvement architecture an organization already uses. A3 thinking. Strategy deployment. Daily management systems. Kaizen events. Value stream maps. Old-school project management.
He gave a project management example to make the point. A hospital was relocating from one side of town to the other. Classic large-scale project management. A Gantt chart with hundreds of deliverables. The project management activity was reduced to the project manager pestering people for updates on their deliverables.
The organization was new to lean and had no formal training in kaizen or kata. What they did was simple. They took all the deliverables off the Gantt chart and turned them into sticky notes on a wall. To Do, Doing, Done — classic kanban. That's already a kaizen-style move: make work visible, make it flow.
Then they added a kata layer. They split the Doing column into two: Doing This Week, and Doing Today. Each sticky in the weekly column became a target condition for that week. Each sticky in the daily column was a daily PDCA cycle being run against that week's target. Big parent stickies stayed in the weekly column. Smaller child stickies — the daily experiments — moved through the daily column. Rapid cycle iteration got embedded into the project management practice without the word "kata" ever being introduced to the organization's vocabulary.
The point Michael wanted to land was that you don't need formal kata language or formal kata training to start infusing kata principles into existing work. Experiment with how the four routines map onto your current practice. Try treating coaching cycles as experiments. Try splitting your work-in-progress visualization into weekly target conditions and daily iterations. See what produces development.
The symbiotic nature of kaizen and kata becomes visible in practice rather than through theory. Michael's closing point was that the way you approach improvement matters at least as much as the results. When you start to change mindsets, anything is possible in the future. A team that thinks like scientists can tackle whatever challenge arrives. That's what makes any idea truly priceless.
The framework Michael walked through is a working integration of two practices that often get described separately. Kaizen is the engagement and idea-flow side. Kata is the deliberate practice and scientific thinking side. Neither replaces the other. Together they produce something that neither alone fully achieves.
The infrastructure question for both practices is similar. Kaizen at the volume Michael and Mark referenced — Joe Swartz's organization reaching 50 percent annual participation — is not sustainable on spreadsheets or paper. The administrative overhead of tracking that many improvements through identification, implementation, study, and adjustment crushes most attempts before they reach scale. The infrastructure that handles the workflow without consuming the CI lead's time is what makes the volume tractable.
Kata produces a different kind of volume. A learner running PDCA cycles at 30- to 90-minute cadences generates a lot of experiments. Most of those experiments produce a small finding that informs the next experiment. The collective trajectory is what produces the development. Without infrastructure that captures each cycle — what was tested, what was predicted, what actually happened, what was learned — the practice becomes either ceremonial (we said we ran experiments but we didn't track them) or unsustainable (the learner gives up because the administrative overhead of tracking cycles eats the time they'd otherwise spend running them).
Michael's reframe of the KaiNexus OI fields — proposed solution becoming target condition, tasks panel becoming the experiment iteration space — is a small example of how an existing platform can hold the new practice. The fields didn't change. The interpretation of the fields changed. The platform held the structure.
The coaching dimension benefits from the same infrastructure. Michael's coaching kata practice involved observing learners at storyboards, asking the structured set of coaching questions, and tracking his own development as a coach. The storyboards can be physical or digital. The advantage of a digital home for the work is that the coaching cycles are visible to others — peer coaches who want to learn, second-line coaches who are developing the first-line coaches, leaders who want to see whether the practice is producing development. The visibility makes the practice teachable rather than confined to the dyad.
The leadership dimension that Mark emphasized — leaders practicing PDCA visibly, posting their own A3s, treating coaching as a learning practice — depends on the same visibility. Where leaders' improvement work is invisible, employees learn that improvement work is something other people do. Where it's visible, the practice spreads through observation. Infrastructure that keeps leadership work visible is part of the cultural mechanism.
None of this changes what Michael and Mark were teaching. The kaizen is the kaizen. The kata is the kata. The scientific thinking and the coaching and the deliberate practice are the work. What infrastructure does is keep the practice from getting buried, keep the volume tractable, and make the cumulative development visible across the organization rather than confined to the people directly involved.
What does Michael mean by "all ideas are not created equal"? The result an improvement produces is one dimension of its value. The way the improvement was pursued is another. An improvement that produces a process result without developing the people involved produces bounded impact. An improvement that engages staff in the work produces additional impact through engagement and team-building. An improvement that intensely develops the people involved — producing new mindsets, new habits, new scientific thinking reflexes — produces dramatically larger long-term impact because the people who emerge are equipped to lead the next round of improvement with stronger capability. The pursuit matters as much as the result.
What is Toyota Kata? A practice developed at Toyota and articulated in Mike Rother's book "Toyota Kata" for developing scientific thinking habits in organizations. Michael's working summary: kata is the scientific method with two additions — direction (always pursuing a long-term challenge or vision, with target conditions cascading down from it) and deliberate practice (structured repetition that produces habit change rather than just knowledge). Kata is not a process improvement methodology like DMAIC. It's a practice you do daily that produces process improvement as a byproduct of the cognitive change it creates.
What are the four routines of the improvement kata? First: understand the direction or challenge. Second: grasp the current condition through direct observation and rapid PDCA cycles. Third: establish the next target condition — where you want to be in a few weeks to a couple months. Fourth: iterate toward the target condition through rapid PDCA cycles against the obstacles that stand between current and target. None of the routines is exotic. The discipline is the repetition.
What is the gray zone? The space between the current condition and the target condition. Kata practitioners don't assume they know the direct path between the two. They expect to take side trips, head in wrong directions for a cycle or two, and iterate their way through. The willingness to live in that uncertainty — to relish the gray zone rather than try to plan it away — is what produces the learning. Michael linked this to Ronald Heifetz's distinction between technical change (known steps, plannable in advance) and adaptive change (requires iterating through as understanding develops). Most operational improvements are adaptive, even when organizations treat them as technical.
How are kaizen and kata related? They're symbiotic. Kata reinforces kaizen because kaizen's PDCA cycles work better when practitioners have stronger scientific thinking habits — which kata develops through deliberate practice. Coaching skill develops similarly through the coaching kata. Kata also gives kaizen efforts some strategic direction by embedding the question "what's our long-term direction" into the practice. Kaizen reinforces kata because the cultural permission to experiment, fail, and learn that kata requires is what kaizen cultures already provide. Both methods are based on the scientific method, which means they integrate into existing practice without requiring an organization to dismantle what's already working.
Why is coaching such a big part of the kata framework? Because deliberate practice without coaching doesn't produce habit change at the pace it could. The coaching kata gives the coach a structured set of questions to ask the learner during daily coaching cycles. The learner is doing the improvement work. The coach is helping the learner think more scientifically about it. Both sides develop. The coach also treats coaching as an experiment — what's working, what's not, where can I improve my craft. Michael was explicit that you'll make mistakes as a new coach. You'll ask leading questions, manipulative questions, too many questions, not enough questions. The framework gives you a way to get better at coaching while doing the coaching, rather than studying coaching in the abstract.
Can you practice kata without formal training? Yes. Michael's example of the relocating hospital was an organization with no formal kaizen or kata training that adopted the structural elements of both practices simply by visualizing work, splitting it into weekly target conditions and daily PDCA cycles, and running rapid iteration. The word "kata" never entered the organization's vocabulary. The practice did. Mark added that you can get better as a coach through daily kaizen practice alone, by treating every coaching cycle as an experiment and consistently honing your craft. The kata framework speeds up development, but the underlying habit of treating improvement and coaching as experimental practices is the engine.
What was the barcode medication verification example? A hospital had implemented barcode medication verification technology but compliance was poor. A nursing manager wanted to improve it. Michael coached him through the improvement kata while Michael practiced the coaching kata. Early cycles produced superficial answers — more training, more auditing — that didn't work. After many cycles, the actual root cause emerged: the armbands were washing out, which was a materials management issue rather than a compliance issue. The fix improved patient safety. The larger result was that the nursing manager developed a new mental reflex — when in doubt, take another step rather than assume an answer — that transferred to every problem he subsequently tackled.
What was the patient whiteboard example? A hospital had patient room whiteboards for visual communication that weren't being used effectively. A frontline clinical primary nurse wanted to improve it. Michael coached him through the kata. The early obstacles were unglamorous — markers going dry, boards hard to erase. Working on those obstacles cycle by cycle sent a message that the system was being made easier rather than the staff being blamed. Larger issues emerged — nurses and doctors weren't rounding together, which meant the boards weren't being used collaboratively. The cycles continued. The nurse got stronger at empirical root cause analysis. Michael got better at coaching frontline clinical staff, a population he hadn't coached before. Both sides developed alongside the process improvement.
How does kata integrate with KaiNexus? Michael's reframe of the OI record fields is direct. The proposed solution box becomes the target condition — where you want to be in a few weeks to a couple months. The description box stays as the current condition. The OI tasks panel becomes the iteration space where rapid PDCA cycles are run against obstacles on the way to the target. The platform fields don't change. The interpretation of the fields changes. The kaizen-oriented design of the platform supports the kata practice without modification.
What's the relationship between kata and DMAIC or other improvement methodologies? Different category. DMAIC is a process improvement methodology — Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control. Kata is a practice for developing scientific thinking. The process improvement results that kata produces are almost a byproduct of the cognitive change. Organizations that already use DMAIC, A3 thinking, strategy deployment, daily management systems, or other improvement frameworks can integrate kata principles into those practices without replacing them. The principles plug in. The methodologies stay. The development the kata produces makes everything else work better.
What's the connection to neuroplasticity? Michael referenced the cognitive science of habit change throughout. The brain rewires itself through deliberate repetition. New neural pathways form. Mental muscle memory develops. The improvement kata's design is explicitly to provide the repetition that produces the rewiring. Michael recommended looking for videos on neuroplasticity from other sources, since the cognitive science behind why deliberate practice works is well-developed in the broader literature and worth understanding for anyone serious about the practice.
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