KaiNexus CEO and co-founder Greg Jacobson joins host Mark Graban for the twenty-fifth episode of the Ask Us Anything series, the recurring session built around questions from webinar attendees. The questions in this batch came in from the Dominican Republic, California, the financial services industry, and Vietnam, which is a useful reminder of how universal these problems are. Whether you run a hospital, a factory, or a bank, the same questions surface. Should the organization standardize on one improvement methodology or allow several? How do you measure engagement without waiting two years for a survey? How do you actually start an operational excellence culture without it collapsing into a proclamation nobody follows? And what separates the organizations that succeed from the ones that don't?
Here is what the episode covers and the thinking behind each answer.
A reader named Kristin asked how important it is to have a single accepted methodology, PDCA or DMAIC for example, given that methodologies are mostly the same but more than one can confuse employees. Mark agreed there's a real risk, and named a second one beyond confusion: the flavor-of-the-month problem. If the organization embraced one acronym and then introduces another, people read it as the latest fad rather than a durable commitment. His suggested countermeasure is to use a broad, stable umbrella label, operational excellence, business performance excellence, process improvement, whatever fits, and synthesize different approaches under it. Start with small Kaizen, add DMAIC for tougher problems, use DMAIC as the backbone of the A3 template. New methods land better when they're framed as additive to what came before rather than as replacements.
Greg's point was about the cost of fragmentation. The more consistent an organization is in its methodology, the better its chances of spreading improvement behavior and culture. Organizations with fragmented pockets that never unified, on method or at least on shared language, end up with silos. People are effectively speaking different languages. He sees this during customer onboarding, where teams that worked in isolation discover each other's forms and processes for the first time, which sparks a useful conversation about unifying. The thing not to do is get hung up. There are many ways to catch a butterfly. What matters most is that the work keeps moving. If people can't agree, Greg would rather they do something than degrade into arguing about tools and nomenclature.
Mark added the layer underneath methodology: consistent principles. Methods can vary, and tools can be added, but bedrock principles, focus on the customer, engage everyone, engage the people who do the work, eliminate fear, should stay constant. Within that stable principle set, different methodologies can coexist. The image Greg likes is the one showing different-sized bubbles: a method for small local rapid changes, a method for medium-scale work, a method for large-scale change, and something that aligns them all. No organization has all of those on day one. That's the destination the journey moves toward, and the more consistent the pieces are, the bigger the payoff.
Mark named one more risk: turf battles. At the last manufacturing company he worked for, the program was called Lean Six Sigma Plus, and people were certified in either the Lean track or the Six Sigma track. That structure could have curdled into the Lean people not wanting the Six Sigma people to get credit, which would have been deeply dysfunctional. It didn't, but the risk is real, and it's worth designing against.
He also pointed to the research behind the small-improvements case. Robinson and Schroeder, in "The Idea-Driven Organization," found an 80/20 pattern across multiple companies, industries, and countries: roughly eighty percent of the benefit to an organization comes from the smaller, frontline-driven improvements. Notably, this is not the Pareto principle being invoked loosely; it's a finding from their research that happens to land near the same ratio. Organizations that focus only on big projects and transformational change miss most of the available value.
A reader named Lilly in California asked how to measure engagement and culture change without relying on a survey every two years. This is a question the hosts get often, and Mark's anchor answer is the number of implemented improvements. It's a strong real-time proxy for engagement and for how well a CI culture is taking hold. You can watch the number climb, or watch it fluctuate around an average, and use process behavior charts to avoid overreacting to every up and down. Keep doing the surveys too, but expect the standard engagement-survey indicators, "my ideas are valued at work" and the like, to climb sharply after two years of real continuous improvement practice.
Greg connected the metric to how KaiNexus runs its own goals. For four years the company has set a big hairy audacious goal, in the Jim Collins sense, around the number of completed improvements across its customer base, attempting to double the all-time total every year. The reason this works as a goal is exactly that it reflects whether customers' cultures are healthy. He also pushed back, gently, on the common phrase "we don't have the right culture to do that yet." That framing confuses him, because culture is the sum of the actions you take. You develop a culture of improvement by improving. Seth Godin's definition is the one he reaches for: people like us do things like this. If you care about engagement, it's because you're trying to build a culture, and the best way to see whether you're building one is to watch whether improvements are actually being implemented.
The distinction Greg drew next is the one worth keeping. Two organizations of a hundred people each implement a hundred improvements in a year. On the surface, equal engagement. But if ten people produced all hundred in one organization and eighty people produced all hundred in the other, the second has far healthier engagement, because the practice is spread across the workforce rather than concentrated in a few people. Mark added percent participation as a companion metric to the more common "ideas per person per year," along with a note on how to define participation generously. The old suggestion-box systems gave credit to one person. Healthy CI cultures, like the one he saw recently at Franciscan Health in Indianapolis, count anyone who had input. Some people are good at the initial observation, some at creative problem solving, some at implementing, some at communicating and spreading a success to other parts of the organization. Don't punish people for not being the originator or the primary implementer. If they participated, give them the credit.
On the BHAG itself, Mark made the point that a big hairy audacious goal works precisely because you don't punish people for missing it. It's a stretch goal meant to drive effort. He paraphrased Vince Lombardi: aim for perfection and you might achieve excellence. Nobody's perfect, Toyota included.
A reader named Arnaldo in financial services asked how to start a successful deployment of an operational excellence culture, including the must-dos and the steps to avoid. Mark's first piece of advice is to start with a model area, especially in a large or distributed organization, or even a single large site like a hospital or factory. Prove the culture works somewhere, then spread it. But there's a risk in starting purely locally: if senior executives aren't on board with the principles, the predominant culture of the organization can quietly squash the good work happening in the model area. The ideal is upper-level support for the vision combined with a deliberate decision to start somewhere, rather than trying to change the whole culture by proclamation, which does not work.
Greg added an important nuance about whose buy-in matters. The most senior, most influential leader is ideal, but don't skip the work because you only have a leader over fifty or a hundred people. Get the leaders at whatever level you're operating. The key is that the local leader understands part of their job is to get their model area running and then carry it higher up the organization, because getting the whole organization on board requires leadership participation that is daily and genuine, not a rubber stamp. Even five or ten minutes a day, as long as it's front of mind.
Greg also named two steps to avoid. Don't overanalyze. Spending two years building the perfect system and training everyone before you start is a pattern that doesn't work. Go from a model area, run it as a rapid PDSA, and learn as you go. But the opposite error is just as real: you won't spread this to ten thousand people in two weeks either. There's a Goldilocks pace, and it's a function of three variables, the organization's need, the level of leadership support, and the resources committed. How fast you can reasonably move depends on where those three land.
A reader named Lynn in Vietnam asked what the success criteria are for a continuous improvement organization, in terms of leader skills and behaviors. Greg's answer drew on the pattern KaiNexus has seen across hundreds of organizations it has worked with and thousands it has spoken to. The organizations that ten out of ten people would call successful share three things, organized around people, process, and technology.
Behaviors come first, and specifically the behaviors of leaders. When leaders behave the right way, it produces a methodology. The pairing of the right people behaviors with a workable methodology produces a culture of improvement. And because that culture can't run on oral tradition, it has to be logged, communicated, and supported by technology. Pick technology that makes capturing the work, tracking it, and reporting on it easier, because the easier those become, the higher the organization's success. When all three are in sync, behaviors, methodology, and supporting technology, you get a significant acceleration in improvement. Mark was fully aligned and let the three-part frame stand as the close.
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.
See KaiNexus in action and see how KaiNexus helps organizations capture ideas, coach improvement, and connect daily work to strategy.
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