Continuous improvement work produces real results. Cost savings, quality gains, safety improvements, time back. What it often does not produce is a clear answer when an executive asks what the organization is getting from all of it.
That gap is where continuous improvement funding goes to die. Across the improvements tracked in KaiNexus, only about 28 percent show a direct, visible financial impact. The rest is real work with real value that never gets translated into terms leadership can act on. So when the CI champion finally gets the meeting, the answer arrives as a spreadsheet, a set of caveats about data quality, and a week of assembly effort.
CI does not have an impact problem. CI has a translation problem.
-- Jeff Roussel
In this recorded webinar, Jeff Roussel, Chief Revenue Officer at KaiNexus, argues that the work is not the issue. He has spent more than twelve years talking with organizations about their improvement programs, and he walks through what separates the programs that get funded from the ones that stay underfunded and misunderstood.
Mark Graban hosts and joins Jeff for a Q&A on soft benefits, ROI thresholds, short-term versus long-term thinking, and how to get in the room in the first place.
Most CI champions walk into the budget conversation and describe their own problems. Spreadsheets are painful. The program is hard to manage. Tracking is inconsistent. Every one of those statements is true, and none of them is what executives are deciding about.
Executives are deciding where to invest. They are held accountable for growth, cost, risk, and outcomes. They want to know whether they can trust the impact numbers coming out of the improvement organization, whether that work is aimed at the right priorities, and whether they should put more money behind it.
I don't think executives are buying continuous improvement. I think they're buying confidence.
-- Jeff Roussel
It is the same work described in two different languages. Ideas, A3s, kaizen events, and engagement on one side. Cost, risk, throughput, and outcomes on the other. Stay on the first side and the conversation does not land. Worse, the request stalls quietly rather than getting a clear no.
What's weird is that something else will always win.
-- Jeff Roussel, on competing with sales, marketing, and HR for investment
Those functions are not more important. They are easier to understand and easier to justify.
If the answer to "what are we getting from all of this?" requires pulling several spreadsheets together, reconciling them, and explaining the caveats, the credibility damage happens before the number ever gets read.
If your answer takes a week to build, you've already lost.
-- Jeff Roussel
A hospital system reserved operating rooms for emergency cases and adjusted its scheduling patterns. The result was $137 million in documented savings, shorter delays, faster treatment for urgent patients, and an avoided facility expansion. As Jeff points out, that description contains no A3s, no kaizen events, and no software. It is a business result.
A global mining company runs its improvement system across more than 12,000 employees, with nearly 284,000 improvements logged, $178 million in financial impact, and 89 percent of employees actively engaged. Not an industry anyone thinks of as a continuous improvement bellwether.
A global consumer goods manufacturer documented $38 million in savings plus $11.7 million in new revenue, from 5,000 implemented ideas in a year, with 57 percent of ideas driving actual change. The revenue side matters. Improvement that only ever shows up as cost cutting is a harder sell over time.
A fintech company made its improvement system the single source of truth for AI-driven savings, with an internal rule that if it was not in the system, it did not count. Documented savings went from $4.5 million to $15 million within a year, and leadership expanded the program budget.
They didn't get funded for doing improvement. They got funded for proving impact.
-- Jeff Roussel
Jeff's view is that most CI champions undersell their own work. Describing it as a program makes it sound like support work, something the organization does when times are good.
You are not running a continuous improvement program. You're running a business outcome engine.
-- Jeff Roussel
The session offers a why, how, what sequence, borrowed from Simon Sinek's Start With Why. Most funding conversations run in reverse, opening with the tool or the solution before anyone has agreed the problem is worth solving.
Start with why the problem matters to the executive, not to you. Jeff's test is Advil, not vitamins. A vitamin is nice to have and easy to skip for a few weeks. Advil solves a headache that exists right now. Connect the request to missed priorities, delayed execution, poor decisions, or a leaky P&L.
Then explain how solving it changes the business. Better decisions, visibility into what is working, faster follow-through, improvements that scale instead of getting re-solved in five departments.
Only then make the ask, and make it small enough to approve. One team, one workflow, one success metric, a 90-day pilot. That is a request for proof rather than a request for transformation, and it is a much easier decision to say yes to.
The structure worth screenshotting is pain, impact, ask. What is happening now, how often, and what it costs in time, money, or risk. Why that matters to the business and which metric it affects. Then the pilot, the metric you will track, and the specific decision you want someone to make.
How do you balance short-term results against long-term thinking? Jeff notes that most business cases he builds target payback inside twelve months, with three years as the outer horizon, and that a leader who cannot show short-term progress may not be around for the long-term payoff. He also names the condition that makes a long horizon possible in the first place: enough psychological safety in the organization for someone to hold the line on it. Mark adds the caution about counterproductive short-term moves, like hitting this year's number by cutting R&D or eliminating the quality function.
Should a CI program fund itself? Jeff's view is yes, over time. He compares the choice to bootstrapping a startup versus taking investment to accelerate, and says that if an organization can afford to fund the faster path, the return usually justifies it.
How do you put a dollar figure on soft benefits like engagement, morale, and quality? Track them early, track them often, and pay more attention to the direction of change than to the precision of any single number. The organizations with the most credible impact figures bring finance and executives into validating them, and adjust their process when the numbers look off.
Track impact and do your best not to make it the goal.
-- Jeff Roussel
Mark pushes further on this one, arguing that gating improvement behind a required return does more harm than good.
I think it's counterproductive to demand an ROI threshold. People are not just ROI machines.
-- Mark Graban
You end up getting more cumulative financial impact by not focusing only on financial impact and ROI.
-- Mark Graban
The improvements with a knowable financial return effectively fund everything else. Mark points to the health system in Indiana that he wrote about with Joe Swartz in Healthcare Kaizen, where calculating an ROI was quite literally optional, and finance still got looped in when a change turned out to carry real savings.
What if executives will not even give you the meeting? Define the problem and the cost of the current state, then ask what they would need to know in order to say yes. Jeff's observation on this one lands close to home for most Lean practitioners.
It's weird that lean people struggle to take that step and define the problem, because that's what they teach.
-- Jeff Roussel
Mark adds the framing angle: describing what the organization loses by doing nothing often moves people more than describing what it gains by acting.
We already track everything in spreadsheets. Why isn't that enough? The root cause is usually trust, not the tool. Technology can make it easier to involve finance, validate impact, and spread improvements across teams, but it does not create credibility on its own.
Mark recalls visiting a hospital five years into its improvement journey and asking the CI leader how he would answer an executive who asked what the impact had been. The answer, close to verbatim: he was not worried about impact, because they had been building capabilities.
It's great to be building capabilities, but that's not going to guarantee your survival.
-- Mark Graban
Organizations do cut continuous improvement staff for short-term savings. Demonstrating value financially, without making financial value the only thing that counts, is what keeps that from happening.
Continuous improvement leaders and program managers preparing a budget request. Operational excellence directors who have to report impact to an executive team. Healthcare and manufacturing leaders weighing where to invest. Anyone whose improvement program is doing good work without getting credit for it.
Start With Why by Simon Sinek. Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. To Sell Is Human by Dan Pink. Rory Sutherland of Ogilvy, on framing the pain of a current state before proposing a solution.
Why do continuous improvement programs struggle to get funded? Usually because the value is described in program terms rather than business terms. Leadership is deciding where to invest, and improvement activity that is not translated into cost, risk, throughput, or outcomes is harder to justify than requests coming from sales, marketing, or HR.
What percentage of improvements have a measurable financial impact? About 28 percent of improvements tracked in KaiNexus show a direct, visible financial impact. That is normal and it is enough. The improvements with a knowable financial return effectively fund everything else.
Should every improvement require an ROI calculation? No. Mark's view in the session is that requiring an ROI threshold before people can improve their own work is counterproductive, and that organizations get more cumulative financial impact when ROI is not the price of admission.
How do I start if I have no budget, no analyst, and no support? Define your current state. Write down what outcomes your program is generating today and what you can actually prove. Then run one small improvement well, at the scale of one team if that is what you have.
What should I ask for in the meeting? A pilot, not a transformation. One team, one workflow, one success metric, and a specific decision you want the executive to make.
Nobody gets funding for doing improvement work. The only way you get funding is for proving impact.
-- Jeff Roussel
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