The most common reason organizations give for not improving more is also the least examined: we don't have time. In this session, Mark Graban and Greg Jacobson, MD, push back on that assumption directly. The honest version of "I don't have time" is almost always "I'm choosing not to make time for this" -- and once you frame it that way, the conversation changes.
Mark and Greg work through why the busyness trap exists, how leaders break it, and how habit science explains why some organizations build improvement into daily work while others keep treating it as a special project that never quite happens.
Every survey response Mark has ever collected after a workshop or webinar lists the same barrier to improvement: time. Staff don't have time. Managers don't have time. We don't have time to do this.
The trap underneath that response looks like this. We're too busy to improve. Because we don't improve, waste and frustration accumulate. That makes us busier. Repeat.
The organizations that escape the trap don't start with extra time on their hands. None of the great continuous improvement organizations began with an empty hour blocked off every day. They started by recognizing that some portion of their busyness was waste, and that working on that waste was an investment that paid back in time -- not a withdrawal from a fixed account.
That reframe matters. Improvement work isn't an expense. It's an investment that compounds, and the early returns fund the next round.
When improvement isn't happening, leaders need to know which version of the problem they're dealing with.
Can't means people don't know how. They haven't been trained, coached, or supported. They don't feel confident running a small experiment, so they avoid it. The fix is teaching and coaching.
Don't means people know how but aren't doing it. The cue isn't there, the routine feels heavy, or the reward never shows up. The fix is making the practice easier and more visible.
Won't means there's an active choice not to participate -- usually rooted in a belief like "my employees don't have ideas worth spending time on." This is rarer, and it's a leadership behavior issue almost every time.
All three are addressable. Each requires a different leadership response. Lumping them together as "they don't have time" hides what's actually going on.
A common question from leaders trying to start: how much time per week, realistically?
Greg and Mark land on a low number. A 15-minute daily huddle is enough to get going. The huddle itself isn't where deep problem-solving or implementation happens -- it's a cue. Maybe another 15 to 30 minutes a day across the team for the actual improvement work, especially in the early weeks.
Mark tells the story of asking a manager at Franciscan St. Francis Health in Indianapolis -- an endoscopy unit running hundreds of frontline kaizens a year -- how much time her team spent on improvement. Her answer was essentially: how much time do you spend breathing? Once it's habitual, the question stops making sense. But getting there requires a deliberate starting point: 15 minutes, every day, with a real cue and a real routine.
The same manager described carving out time during staff meetings that already existed and running short "kaizen blitzes" over lunch -- not the week-long event version, just 30 minutes where people surfaced ideas they'd been carrying around in their heads. Small, repeated, low-friction.
A different lens from a tour at Toyota's San Antonio plant. A frontline worker fielded the question every visitor eventually asks: you talk about kaizen, but everyone's busy building trucks -- when do you actually do it?
Her answer: if she had an idea and there was no time during the shift, she'd talk to her supervisor, who would generally approve overtime to stay and work on it.
That answer cuts hard against the reflex in most healthcare and service environments, which is to send people home the moment the workload dips and treat overtime as the enemy. Toyota's calculation is different. The overtime is cheap relative to the value of the improvement, and refusing to fund improvement work guarantees the cycle keeps repeating. If your CI program is already in KaiNexus, the ROI math on this is straightforward -- the impact of improvements is tracked, and "should we approve 30 minutes of overtime to implement this?" stops being a debate.
Mark and Greg lean on Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habit to explain what's happening when continuous improvement starts to stick. Every habit has three parts: a cue, a routine, and a reward. Strip out any one of them and the habit doesn't form.
For improvement work, the daily huddle is the cue. The routine is small enough not to overwhelm -- surface a problem, log an idea, work on something already in progress. The reward is the visible result: walking into work and seeing the change you suggested actually in place. That's an intrinsic reward and it's faster, cheaper, and more durable than any external recognition program.
This is why suggestion box systems fail. The cycle is too slow. You drop an idea in, hear nothing for weeks, and the habit never forms because the reward never arrives. Greg's point: it's not that suggestion boxes are bad in concept, it's that the feedback loop is broken. Whatever replaces them -- digital or otherwise -- has to close that loop fast.
It's also why some teams report "huddles aren't helpful" and quit. If nothing improves as a result of the huddle, there's no reward, the loop breaks, and the team is right to abandon the practice. The fix isn't to enforce attendance. The fix is to make the huddle actually produce improvements.
A practical wrinkle Greg and Mark talk through: daily huddles aren't always the right cadence. One hospital they reference moved from daily to three times a week because they didn't have enough progress between huddles to make daily check-ins meaningful. That's the right kind of adjustment -- match the cadence to the actual rhythm of the work, then protect the time you've committed to.
Greg makes a physics point that's worth keeping. Starting continuous improvement is harder than continuing it. Static friction is always greater than kinetic friction. The first week, the first month, the first six weeks take significantly more energy than year three of a mature program.
This explains a pattern leaders see and misread constantly. Early effort feels disproportionate to early results, so leaders conclude the program isn't working and pull back -- right before the kinetic phase would have kicked in. The right response is the opposite: protect the practice through the static phase, knowing the energy required will drop once the box starts moving.
A few specific moves that came up in the conversation. None of them require a budget.
No-meeting zones. ThedaCare protected 8-10 a.m. every day as a zone with no formal scheduled conference room meetings. That time goes to gemba walks, huddle boards, and improvement work. The cue is the time on the calendar. The routine is improvement. The reward is visible progress.
A goal that names the time. Dr. Marwan AlBakri at Henry Ford set an explicit target with his team: 20 minutes a day for improvement, and nobody gets criticized for taking that time. The number isn't sacred. The act of naming it is.
A running list of opportunities for improvement. When 20 minutes opens up unexpectedly, you don't want to spend 18 of them deciding what to work on. Mature KaiNexus customers maintain an active list of OFIs so any pocket of time can be put to use immediately.
Use slow seasons deliberately. A hospital lab Mark works with is slammed with virology testing in winter. They accumulate ideas during the busy season and implement them during the slower months -- which then makes the next peak season less stressful. Not ideal, but better than not improving.
Audit your meetings. If a meeting is one-way communication, it's a memo. If you're attending without contributing, send a delegate or read the notes. Challenge the default 60-minute meeting block -- most should be 30 or 15.
Personal time management. Greg recommends "The Secret Weapon" video series for combining Getting Things Done principles with task management and inbox zero. The point isn't the specific system; it's that personal time discipline frees capacity for the important-but-not-urgent work, which is where improvement lives. Stephen Covey's distinction between urgent and important is the right framing.
Switching from logic to emotion changes what people are willing to make time for. Switch by Chip and Dan Heath calls this painting the postcard -- describing what a better future actually looks like in concrete terms. A workday with less frustration. Going home on time. Patients not waiting. A team that gets credit when an idea works.
Most CI sales pitches inside organizations skip this step and lead straight to methodology. People don't make time for methodology. They make time for outcomes that matter to them.
A question that came up during Q&A and is worth its own section: what do you do when frontline staff are eager but leadership won't support the time?
Two paths. The first is to demonstrate before asking. Find pockets of available time -- the 10 minutes at the start of a shift, the lull after the morning rush -- and implement small improvements that prove the model. Then bring measurable results back to leadership and make the case for protected time. Static friction is real; sometimes you have to break it from below.
The second is to reframe the conversation in terms leadership cares about. Not "we want to do more lean" but "we have a strategic priority that currently has 10 people working on it. We have 5,000 people who could be contributing to it." That's a different conversation. The KaiNexus webinar on the ROI of continuous improvement walks through how to build that case in detail.
A few specific things the platform does that matter for this topic. KaiNexus gives leaders visibility into where improvement is happening and where it's stalled, so the question of whether the time is being used well stops being a guess. It tracks impact in financial and non-financial terms, which makes the case for protected improvement time concrete instead of theoretical. It maintains the active list of opportunities for improvement that lets teams put unexpected pockets of time to immediate use. And it spreads improvements across departments and facilities, so the time invested at one site pays off across the organization.
If your improvement program is generating ideas but losing them, or generating results but failing to make those results visible, that's the problem the platform is built to solve.
Mark Graban is Senior Advisor at KaiNexus and a recognized voice in Lean management and continuous improvement. He is the author of Lean Hospitals, Healthcare Kaizen, and The Mistakes That Make Us, and host of the Lean Blog Interviews podcast. He has worked with healthcare systems, manufacturers, and service organizations to build cultures grounded in respect for people, scientific problem solving, and learning from mistakes.
Greg Jacobson, MD is co-founder and CEO of KaiNexus and a practicing emergency physician. After being introduced to kaizen principles early in his medical career, Greg founded KaiNexus to help organizations scale continuous improvement, increase visibility, and make improvement part of daily work rather than an occasional initiative.
Why do organizations say they don't have time for continuous improvement?
The honest version is usually that they're choosing not to prioritize it. Time isn't typically the constraint -- priority is. The cycle reinforces itself because not improving creates more waste, which creates more busyness, which feels like even less time. The teams that escape the cycle treat improvement as an investment that pays back in reclaimed time, not as overhead.
How much time per day or per week is needed to start a continuous improvement program?
A 15-minute daily huddle plus 15 to 30 minutes for actual improvement work across the team is enough to get traction in the first weeks. The early effort feels disproportionate because static friction is higher than kinetic friction -- starting takes more energy than continuing. After the first six to eight weeks, the time required drops sharply.
How do you make continuous improvement a habit rather than a special project?
Build the habit loop deliberately. The cue is a recurring time on the calendar -- typically a daily huddle or a no-meeting zone. The routine is small and low-friction enough to do consistently. The reward is fast and visible -- the change you suggested is actually in place. Slow feedback breaks the loop, which is why suggestion boxes generally fail and why daily cycles outperform monthly ones.
Why do daily huddles fail in some organizations?
Almost always because nothing actually improves between huddles. The cue and the routine are present, but the reward isn't. The fix isn't to enforce attendance; it's to make the huddle produce visible improvements so the loop closes and the habit can form. If progress between huddles is too thin to support a daily cadence, dropping to three times a week is a reasonable adjustment.
What can frontline staff do if leadership won't protect time for improvement?
Demonstrate before asking. Find small pockets of available time, run a few small improvements, and bring measurable results back to leadership. Then make the case in terms of strategic outcomes leadership already cares about, not in terms of methodology. The KaiNexus webinar on the ROI of continuous improvement covers the framing in more detail.
How does Toyota think about overtime for improvement work?
Differently from most healthcare and service environments. At Toyota's San Antonio plant, supervisors generally approve overtime when an employee has an improvement idea and no time to implement it during the shift. The reasoning is that the cost of overtime is small relative to the value of the improvement, and refusing to fund improvement guarantees the busyness cycle continues.
This transcript has been edited for readability.
Mark Graban: Hello, and welcome to today's KaiNexus webinar, Making Time for Continuous Improvement. I'm Mark Graban, VP of Customer Success at KaiNexus, and I'm joined by Dr. Greg Jacobson.
Greg Jacobson: I couldn't be happier to be here, Mark. Glad everyone could find the time to join us.
Mark Graban: Our theme today is time. While I was preparing, I was listening to music online, and it's amazing how many songs have a theme related to time. I'm not going to sing any of these, and Greg isn't either.
Greg Jacobson: Oh, you didn't? I've been preparing for weeks.
Mark Graban: We might get voted off stage if we sang. There's an old song by The Outsiders called "Time Won't Let Me." That's an interesting view of time -- time isn't letting you do anything. It seems a little self-defeating. Greg and I both grew up during the '80s, and Culture Club had a famous song with a similar idea, that time won't give me time.
Greg Jacobson: If a year ago you'd told me we were going to give a webinar with Boy George on one of the slides, I would have thought you had lost it. But I love that we got him in there.
Mark Graban: If we think about time and continuous improvement, we might ask: are we being a victim? Are we blaming the world, or blaming time? Or are we in control of how we manage our time?
Greg Jacobson: It's really a matter of whether you're being passive or active with what you do during the day. I catch myself saying this all the time: "I don't have time to do blank." A few years ago I read a book with a real insight. If you find yourself saying, "I don't have time to do continuous improvement," the more honest way to say it is, "I choose not to make time for continuous improvement." That may be a little less true in the workplace, but for the most part we have control over our calendars and how we allocate time from when we wake up until we go to sleep.
Greg Jacobson: So what we're really talking about is priorities. What you do during your day reflects your priorities. For example, I never used to have time to exercise. Then I discovered squash. With squash, you have to book time on the court. It's like making an appointment, and you have a partner who's going to show up. We're going to talk about how creating some rigor around your activities helps you make time. If you say you don't have time to play squash, or you don't have time for continuous improvement, it's really a decision about priorities.
Mark Graban: Did you ever tell yourself, "I'm choosing not to exercise"?
Greg Jacobson: No. I always thought, "I just don't have time to exercise." But we need to get into the mindset that it's a choice you're making about how to spend your day.
Mark Graban: This year I've been a lot more disciplined about exercising since booking time with a personal trainer. There's a commitment, and making a commitment makes it easier to follow through. When I used to play the victim and say, "I didn't have time to work out today," if I really stepped back, I'd realize I woke up and lay in bed for 45 minutes looking at Facebook and Twitter. That was a choice. I chose that instead of getting out of bed and going to the gym.
Greg Jacobson: So let's think through the barriers to breaking through that thought process.
Mark Graban: We hear about barriers all the time. After our webinars and in workshops, we ask a very open-ended question: what are your barriers to improvement and innovation? The most frequent response is some variation of a lack of time. Staff don't have time. Managers don't have time. That's part of why we chose this topic today.
Greg Jacobson: And it's a fact. People are busy. Organizations doing great continuous improvement work weren't organizations that had an hour blocked out every day where they did nothing. They were doing what they thought was the right standard work at the time and recognizing there might be a better way. Nobody who started doing continuous improvement work wasn't busy. Let's keep that in mind.
Mark Graban: People are busy, but in Lean we teach people to look at the difference between being busy and adding value. How much of our busyness is waste? How much of that can be taken out of our day by changing how we do our work, or by the choices we make about our time? I don't think any organization we'd now consider great at continuous improvement started with the luxury of a lot of time. They found a way to break the cycle: we're too busy, so we don't improve, so things get worse, so somehow we have even less time. There are ways to break that cycle and turn it into a positive one.
Greg Jacobson: As we talk tactically about how to make time, we need to recognize that either you control the way you spend your day, or your organization spends your day for you, or you're passive and not in control. If you're passive, there will never be time. If you change your mindset about who owns that time, and recognize that your priority list is essentially how you spend your time, you can start figuring out how to change.
Mark Graban: Back to the singalong for a second. Jim Croce's "Time in a Bottle" is an oldie but a goodie. Time can't be bottled. We can't go to the store and buy a bottle of time for improvement.
Greg Jacobson: And I can't grow a mustache like that.
Mark Graban: In that song, Croce sings about never having enough time to do the things you want to do once you find them. Overthinking the song again, it makes me think of continuous improvement. You find things you want to change. You find problems and opportunities for improvement. We see people get stuck at that stage. They've got ideas, but they don't move forward or act on them. That's where leaders have to help.
Greg Jacobson: I always tell people that when you're frustrated at work, turn that into a positive experience, because it's really an opportunity for improvement. Don't do the workaround. Stop and take the time to log it. We'll talk shortly about when you can address it.
Mark Graban: When it comes to not having time, we can ask which form of the problem it is. This is a mindset Lean folks and Toyota people have taught me. Say part of the standard is that we do continuous improvement every day or every week, but it's not happening. It might be that people can't make time for Kaizen. Maybe they don't know how to do Kaizen, so they're not making time for it because they're not comfortable, not confident, or not inspired. That can be addressed. Or maybe leadership isn't providing a schedule, so the frontline staff truly can't make time. That takes leadership participation and leadership behaviors.
Mark Graban: Then there's don't. People know how, they have the ability, and they just aren't doing it for whatever reason. And then there's the more explicit won't. They're choosing not to because of some belief, stated or unstated -- like a manager who thinks their employees don't have ideas worth spending time on. I think an intentional "I'm not going to do this" is rare.
Greg Jacobson: I think these are all fixed through leadership behaviors. Depending on which one it is, it changes how leadership addresses it, but this is really a leadership-driven issue.
Mark Graban: Here's a thought experiment. I've never heard anyone say they were late because they ran out of gas because they didn't have time to fuel up the car. If driving is how you get places, you have no choice but to carve out time to add fuel. I think of Kaizen as fuel for the organization. If you want to succeed, you have to take time to add fuel through engagement and implementing ideas.
Greg Jacobson: I'm glad you said "succeed" and not just "improve." I think the organizations that will exist in five, 10, or 15 years are the ones doing this type of work. This might be a matter of survival.
Mark Graban: That makes me think of the W. Edwards Deming quote, which I'll paraphrase: learning is not compulsory, and neither is survival. We learn by doing Kaizen, we improve, and that leads to success, which is the goal. Whether you're a hospital or a manufacturing company, continuous improvement is a good thing to do, but it's meant to drive results over time.
Mark Graban: I've been fortunate to visit organizations with a culture of continuous improvement. When people are getting started, they focus on time: how do I make time, and how much will it take? When I asked one person how much time they spend on continuous improvement, they answered, somewhat cryptically, "How much time do you spend breathing each day?" There may be times when breathing is very intentional, like in meditation, but at some point it just becomes natural.
Greg Jacobson: For an organization that isn't doing anything yet, what's a realistic minimum to get started? Are we talking eight hours a week? Twenty hours a month?
Mark Graban: Some organizations do a 15-minute huddle every day.
Greg Jacobson: So you can get this started with as little as 15 minutes a day.
Mark Graban: That's a start, although huddles are generally for communication, not in-depth problem solving or implementation. Is it reasonable for everyone to spend 30 minutes a day on improvement in an eight- or 10-hour day? I think it is, if we make it a priority.
Mark Graban: One organization I'd really describe as having a culture of continuous improvement is Franciscan St. Francis Health in Indianapolis. I talked with Hollynn, the manager of their endoscopy unit, where they do hundreds and hundreds of Kaizens every year -- small improvements driven by frontline staff. There's real excitement and energy. I asked Hollynn how much time they spend on improvement. She said they're constantly thinking about it. To kickstart it, Kaizen is a specific practice, like carving out time for meditation. But during the day, they find a problem, write it down, talk about it, and work on it. It's become embedded in how they work.
Mark Graban: Hollynn also said the time put into Kaizen is an investment that frees up more time. We use the language of "spending" time, but this is investing time. You get into a virtuous cycle: you identify a problem, you reduce some waste, and that frees up time. What do you do with that time? More improvement.
Mark Graban: She had some specific tips, too. They already had time committed in staff meetings -- like Greg's squash appointment -- so they carved out some of it to talk about new employee ideas. They also did what she called "Kaizen blitzes." She didn't mean a week-long rapid improvement event. She meant getting people together over lunch to brainstorm and document the ideas in their heads that they hadn't written down or put into a system -- in the case of our customers, into KaiNexus -- so the ideas aren't just floating around.
Greg Jacobson: That's a great example of the interplay between leadership and methodology. This is a leader saying we need to prioritize this type of work. She recognizes everyone is busy, and she's not trying to take away people's lunch hour, but there is some downtime where you can brainstorm and pull out the ideas, frustrations, and roadblocks people ran into that morning. And she makes it simple. This isn't a four-hour session. Maybe it's five or 10 minutes over lunch.
Greg Jacobson: The simpler you make the methodology, the better. If you have a 25-step process to submit something and work on it, that limits your ability to use the little lulls in your day. Keep it simple, and make sure your middle-level supervisors, who will drive a lot of this work, recognize that they have to model that behavior and hold people accountable.
Mark Graban: Another organization we often hold up as a model of continuous improvement culture is Toyota. When you visit the plant in San Antonio and ask about making time for improvement, they use the time that's available. If the line goes down because of a breakdown or a parts shortage, they would never dream of sending people home early. They want to use that time to improve.
Mark Graban: One of the tour guides, a frontline employee, was asked, "You talk about Kaizen, but everyone's busy building trucks. How do you do that?" She said, "If I've got an idea and we don't have time to work on it, I'll talk to my supervisor, and they generally approve overtime to stay and work on improvement." That flies in the face of the norm I see in hospitals: cut labor costs, send people home early, no overtime. You're saving money, but what does it cost you in terms of improvement you don't do? You don't want to write a blank check for overtime, but it's a reasonable way to break the cycle of not having time.
Greg Jacobson: If your organization uses KaiNexus, building the ROI case is pretty simple, because you can track the impact of improvement work. That helps justify keeping people a little after their shift or allowing some overtime. We're not saying everyone should get 50 percent overtime. But it's putting your money where your mouth is: we're not sending you home to save a buck, because we want you to improve, and in the long term that's better for the organization and for you.
Greg Jacobson: As we brainstormed the strategies we've seen organizations use to start and keep doing continuous improvement, we kept coming back to that cycle. If you never re-examine your standard work to see if you can get better, you're often doing a lot of non-value-added work -- a lot of waste. It's about breaking the cycle, and the energy needed to break it is higher at the start. A body at rest tends to stay at rest. There's the quote often attributed to Einstein: if you keep doing what you're doing, you'll keep getting what you're getting.
Greg Jacobson: I'm physics-minded, and this is the difference between static and kinetic friction. Getting a box moving across the floor takes a lot of energy. Once it's moving, it doesn't take much to keep it moving. Continuous improvement is the same. The first week, the first month, the first six weeks take significantly more energy to get going than to keep going. That's because you're creating an organizational habit.
Greg Jacobson: I love the book The Power of Habit. It never talks about Lean or process improvement. It talks about personal and organizational habits. When we think about how to create organizational habits for this type of work, the first thing to recognize is what's called the habit loop. There's a cue, then a routine, then a reward. Once you get that reward, the next time you get the cue, you do the routine to get the reward. That's why continuous improvement methodology has to be disciplined.
Mark Graban: I think another key is that these cycles have to be fast. People in Lean and in the Lean Startup world talk about rapid cycles of learning. One problem with suggestion box systems is that they're very slow cycles. I might be trying to develop a new routine of putting something in a suggestion box -- and this applies to a digital suggestion box too, which KaiNexus is not -- but the feedback is slow. You might never get a thank you, or the support to turn the idea into an implemented improvement. With rapid cycles, especially early on with small improvements, you have an idea and boom, we made it happen. The reward is that the improvement made my work easier or improved things for patients. That positive reinforcement leads to more improvement.
Greg Jacobson: To recap, because I think this is the crux of it: how do you start making time? You make it a habit. How do you make it a habit? You need a cue, a routine, and a reward. If you can't do that in a rapid cycle, you won't break the cycle.
Mark Graban: And the reward doesn't have to be money.
Greg Jacobson: No. The reward I see most when people start the type of action that leads to culture change is coming to work, looking around, physically seeing the improvements that were made, and recognizing that the frustrations and bottlenecks in your workplace are being eliminated by you -- by the frontline staff. That's the greatest reward. When we talk about Daniel Pink and extrinsic versus intrinsic rewards, continuous improvement works toward the intrinsic reward because it's immediate and it relates to how you actually spend your day.
Greg Jacobson: So the cue is where daily huddles, or some kind of recurring meeting, really work. And the routine can't be too onerous. If it takes so much energy that you can never get it done -- or if you only focus on projects that take two years to complete -- you never create that habit.
Mark Graban: Last week I saw a hospital that started with daily huddles and learned, in a Plan-Do-Study-Adjust sort of way, that daily was too often. They didn't have enough progress on their improvements to update the team, so they went to three huddles a week. I'd hope they use the 15 minutes that would have been a huddle to implement and test their ideas, so they have updates for the next huddle. Huddles don't have to be daily. Use whatever routine and frequency is helpful.
Mark Graban: When I hear people say, "We stopped doing huddles because they weren't helpful," I'd suggest that instead of giving up on huddles, make them useful. Instead of following a script that was dictated to you, figure out the agenda and the topics and how to facilitate a huddle that becomes a habit.
Greg Jacobson: If the huddle isn't helpful, there's no reward. If you haven't made anything better at the end, then the next time the cue comes, you won't be motivated. That's why low-cost, low-risk improvements that people are empowered to make in their own workplace work so well.
Mark Graban: Time for another song break -- '80s heavy metal from the band Poison.
Greg Jacobson: I love the tremendous amount of hair product on display here.
Mark Graban: In their song "Nothin' But a Good Time," the lyrics are about working and slaving every day and needing to get away from the same old routine. That's often the inspiration for Kaizen: I'm tired of these problems, the drudgery, the jumping through hoops. And the song asks the listener to hear what the singer is thinking. What I take from that is, if you would just listen to frustrated employees and get them to express their ideas and take action...
Greg Jacobson: Maybe the idea is free hairspray in the bathroom.
Mark Graban: We've got to listen to people and engage them. Even before that, there's a powerful idea from the book Switch by Chip and Dan Heath. People recommended it to me for five years, and I finally made time to read it -- I chose to. They talk about not just being logical and rational, but appealing to emotion, or as they put it, painting the postcard. What does a better future look like? Imagine providing the best possible care to patients or service to customers. Imagine a workday that's less frustrating, where we go home on time and feel good about what we're contributing. A vision like that can be compelling, along with a vision of the organization being more successful.
Greg Jacobson: That reminds me of Simon Sinek's Start with Why.
Mark Graban: Once we've established a vision, quite simply, we have to talk to people. We can't just ask, "Why aren't you speaking up?" We have to go ask what problems and opportunities they see and what their ideas are. If we've painted a vision and asked for their ideas, people sometimes figure out on their own how to make time, or how to use time that comes up during the day, because they're self-motivated.
Mark Graban: A nurse friend of mine complained to me about co-workers sitting at the nurses' station reading magazines. Neither of us was blaming those nurses for being bad people. I'd ask why they aren't engaged in making better use of that time. They'd all complain that there are frantic times with too much waste and no time to fix anything -- yet there's time to read a magazine. We don't need to ban magazines. We need to inspire people so they want to participate in continuous improvement.
Greg Jacobson: That's the extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation we talk about a lot. And that engagement has to come from direct supervisors and mid-level managers who go to the gemba and draw this out.
Mark Graban: There's an impasse where employees say, "Why don't you ask me what I think?" and managers say, "Why don't you speak up?" I think managers have to break that cycle.
Mark Graban: There are slow periods within a day, a week, or a year because of seasonality, and it's a very common strategy to take advantage of them. I know a hospital lab that's crazy busy in the winter with virology and other testing. They accumulate ideas and opportunities for improvement and implement them during the slow time later in the year. That might not be ideal, but it's better than not improving. They use that down period to implement improvements that make the next peak season a little less stressful.
Mark Graban: You can look at your volumes and demand over time, and you'll often see very predictable patterns. What do we do with the time between the direct work, like patient care or installing doors on a Toyota truck? One thing you can do is use it for Kaizen. Instead of reflexively sending people home early to avoid so-called waste, turn that time into continuous improvement that gives you better quality and productivity in the long term.
Mark Graban: Once you've identified that time, you don't want to say, "We've got 30 minutes for continuous improvement," and then spend 20 minutes figuring out what to work on. Have a list of opportunities for improvement ready, like a job jar or to-do list. One of our customers, a great user of KaiNexus, keeps a list of active opportunities. If someone on the team has some time, they can go into KaiNexus and say, "Right, I was going to work on that medical staff Rolodex. I've got an hour. Let me knock that out before I go home." Gathering ideas and holding them until you have time, or make time, can be really helpful.
Greg Jacobson: Something related we've noticed with our customers: some people are really great at originating opportunities for improvement, and others are great at modifying, working, and collaborating to make an opportunity doable or even better. Not everyone needs to do everything. It's a collaborative team process, and people should get to do what they're good at. Having a register of ideas to look at during downtime plays into that nicely.
Mark Graban: Say we've gotten the ball rolling. We've set the vision and established a process, and then we hit some trouble where it feels like we're back to step one. Foreigner had a song, "Feels Like the First Time," and we may feel that way about Kaizen when it seems like we're struggling like we did in the beginning. When we hit those troubles, leaders need to help people through the choppy waters.
Greg Jacobson: It's the kinetic versus static friction again. Sometimes the box stops moving and you have to re-engage it.
Mark Graban: I love the example of Dr. Marwan Abouljoud at Henry Ford in Michigan. He set an example for his team by saying 20 minutes a day would be a good target, and that nobody would be criticized or punished for taking time to work on Kaizen. He reminded people of that and set a goal. I think he pulled 20 minutes out of thin air. But there's so much regular work to do that if we don't occasionally pause to focus on improvement, we'll be stuck in the hamster wheel or the rat race -- I'm mixing rodent metaphors here. Leaders need to continually set and reinforce the expectation that it's okay to make time.
Mark Graban: Our friends at ThedaCare -- I don't know if they invented it, but it became popular through them -- created the idea of a "no meeting zone." Starting in 2008, between 8 and 10 every morning there were no formally scheduled conference room meetings. Instead, leaders go to the gemba, work on projects, do huddle boards, and do Kaizen. That's a creative way to free up time.
Greg Jacobson: And that's the habit loop. The cue is 8 to 10 a.m. The routine is going to the gemba. The benefit is that you actually improve some things. Whether it's every day, a couple of times a week, or once a week, it needs to be disciplined. Doing it less often than once a month probably won't work. You can't work out once a quarter and expect results.
Greg Jacobson: I remember financial planning classes in college. When you make a budget, you don't figure out savings with whatever's left at the end. You put savings right at the top. Organizations that succeed with continuous improvement do the same. Daily huddles typically happen at the beginning of a shift. ThedaCare didn't make the no-meeting zone 4 to 6 p.m. You get that work done first.
Mark Graban: You save first. Even without a no-meeting zone, we can ask whether a meeting should really just be a memo. If a meeting is only one-way communication, is that a good reason to meet instead of debating and making decisions? You could cancel some meetings. Some organizations have a rule that if you're not contributing, you shouldn't be there; read the minutes instead. Just because you're invited doesn't mean you have to attend. You could send a delegate or ask for the minutes. Or you can challenge the default 60-minute time slot. Why not more 30-minute meetings or 15-minute standups?
Greg Jacobson: Outlook doesn't help when it defaults to 60 minutes.
Mark Graban: As we start to wrap up -- I'm a child of the '80s -- Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time" talks about getting caught up in circles and confusion. That will happen in this process. We're confused about whether we have good ideas and whether we're doing the right things. That takes me back to our last webinar, where Joe Swartz and I talked about Kaizen coaching.
Greg Jacobson: Joe "Rockstar" Swartz.
Mark Graban: Joe is a rockstar. We had a ton of people sign up, and Joe was the reason. The key is you've got to coach people. Don't just tell them to go improve or go make time. You have to coach and help them work through it.
Greg Jacobson: You need to create the right environment.
Mark Graban: One thing I make time for is reading the news. Every morning I download the Wall Street Journal to my iPad and take time to read it. One of the ads they run in the app features will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas, who sits on the boards of tech companies. The message is that he's a busy guy who doesn't have time, but he makes time to read the Journal.
Greg Jacobson: You could replace that with "people who don't have time make time to do continuous improvement." We could do an ad series with some of our customers.
Mark Graban: The final song is Peter Gabriel's "Big Time." When you get positive cycles going with Kaizen, you build excitement. People take advantage of opportunities to identify a problem, speak up, fix it, test it, measure it, and be recognized. That can be fun. If we're going to reach the big time as an organization, we have to engage people, and we have to make time for improvement.
Greg Jacobson: What's exciting is that this doesn't take years. You can start today, and within a couple of weeks you can see a real, visible impact from this type of work.
Mark Graban: Let's get to questions. Raul asks: "I manage 15 people. Do you recommend engaging all of them at the same time, or giving one-on-one sessions for doing Kaizen?"
Greg Jacobson: To me the answer is both, but how would you answer that more eloquently, Mark?
Mark Graban: Both. Huddles bring people together as a team. There's also a time and place for rounding, asking people about ideas or problems they've seen, and looking for people who might be struggling. Even when an idea starts with an individual, it very quickly becomes a team activity. You talk about it in the huddle, you form a small team, you put it into KaiNexus, and people are assigned as participants. Most Kaizen can't be purely individual, because an improvement I make might affect you. We have to put our heads together, even if the spark comes from one person.
Greg Jacobson: When you do one-on-ones, I think it's more effective to make them shorter and more frequent rather than longer and less frequent. Spend a couple of minutes with someone. I wouldn't schedule a formal hour-long meeting about continuous improvement. Make it a natural part of the day when you bump into someone, or schedule something much shorter. People absorb it at a deeper level when they're exposed to it over time.
Mark Graban: And it's easier to start with small improvements. If people already feel they don't have time, and I tell them to carve out a week for a big project, they choke on that. It's too much.
Mark Graban: Another question: "It seems like much of this is a function of time management. Do you have any basic time management principles you personally use to manage priorities?"
Greg Jacobson: I've done a lot of thinking, and a lot of doing, on that over the last several years. I'd highly recommend a website called The Secret Weapon. It's a series of videos that combines the Getting Things Done mentality from David Allen, a task management system, and the zero-email inbox. Working through those videos and practicing them changed how I handle email and tasks. Everything gets funneled in, tasks get labeled and prioritized and scheduled for the day you expect to do them, and on Sunday I look at the whole week. It's significantly decreased my stress because I know I have a handle on everything, and it's increased my efficiency.
Mark Graban: Another framework is Stephen Covey's distinction between the urgent and the important. Kaizen is important, but it might not always be urgent. We have to balance the urgent firefighting and workarounds against the important, and you have to choose to make time for the important.
Mark Graban: Part of time management is learning to reduce waste in your own work. The Lifehacker website often shares good articles about saving time and automating things in your personal life. I spend far less time on bills than I did when I wrote checks; almost everything goes to my credit card, and I review and pay one bill a month. Scheduling used to mean endless back-and-forth emails. First I shared my calendar so people could see when I was free. Then I learned that Greg and the rest of the team use a tool called YouCanBook.me, where people can see my availability and book a slot directly. That eliminates a lot of annoying administrative email and frees up time for more meaningful work.
Mark Graban: Another question: "Employees are eager for improvements, but leadership doesn't find time to support it. What do you recommend?" If leadership isn't convinced yet, employees can use whatever time is available to make some improvements and demonstrate the benefits. Then make the case to management: "We found 10 minutes here and 20 minutes there and made these improvements." Or ask, "If you let us stay an extra hour, here are three things we'd implement." If that gives it a kickstart, hopefully it becomes more self-sustaining. Once you've freed up time, reinvest it in improvement, free up even more time, and spend it doing better-quality work for your customers.
Greg Jacobson: Some organizations already have leaders who get it, and people who work there are lucky and probably more satisfied at work. Otherwise, this is where Switch and Start with Why come in. If the ROI is compelling and the impact of continuous improvement is visible, leaders generally respond, because they want the organization to operate better, provide better service, make more money, and earn higher customer loyalty. We did an entire webinar on the ROI of continuous improvement. You can frame it this way: "You've identified this as a strategic priority. Right now we have a team of 10 people working on it. We'd like 5,000 people thinking about this problem." Don't frame it as "I want to go do continuous improvement." Frame it around the outcome you'll deliver. Then leaders get interested, and you can work back to how to get there.
Mark Graban: Next: "I just moved into a new position where previous management mismanaged Lean principles. Now the team isn't interested in starting over. Any tips on building interest again?" I have two thoughts. First, focus less on Lean and more on goals and a vision. If you ask people, "Do you want to implement Lean?" they may look at you like, who cares? But if you ask, "Do we want to improve safety?" the answer is yes. Then introduce methods from Lean or other approaches that help accomplish those goals. Start with why.
Mark Graban: Second, it may be easier to come in after someone else's mistakes than to reboot after your own. Honestly critique what happened before, why it was a problem, and why it was a misapplication or misinterpretation of Lean. People will often give a new leader a fresh chance: we're going to try this differently to accomplish these goals.
Greg Jacobson: I think starting with why is the key to rebooting those efforts, rather than leading with the terminology. It's getting back to the roots.
Mark Graban: One more: "How would you recommend holding people accountable for making time for continuous improvement?"
Greg Jacobson: This is where leadership, methodology, and technology come together. You can use the carrot or the stick, and the carrot works better. Another key is for leadership to have visibility into the work, and this is where KaiNexus helps. How do you scale pockets of excellence across the whole organization? You need a way to see how each department is doing. Maybe one is exceeding expectations and another isn't doing much. That visibility helps you figure out which improvements should be spread, gives you a framework to spread them, and supports collaboration across departments to break down silos. We built the technology because there are questions about improvement work that can't be answered with paper and email.
Mark Graban: Thanks, Greg, and thank you to everyone who attended. And thanks, as always, for taking the time today.
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