KaiNexus CEO and co-founder Greg Jacobson joins host Mark Graban for the fifth episode of the Ask Us Anything series, the recurring session built around questions submitted by webinar attendees. The questions this time come from manufacturing, financial services, and healthcare, but they share one thread: how do you overcome resistance to Lean and get people to genuinely take part in improvement work? Resistant engineers, hesitant frontline associates, skeptical executives -- the conversation works through all of them, along with coaching, standard work versus storytelling, and how to connect improvement to the financial results leaders care about.
Here is what the episode covers and the thinking behind each answer.
The episode opened with a question from an attendee ramping up Lean in an engineering group, where highly technical people seemed to consider it beneath them. Greg's first point: these principles apply to anything. He has seen kaizen and continuous improvement used on personal routines, on family life, and inside organizations doing highly technical work. The kind of widget moving through a process does not change whether a problem-solving structure helps.
Both hosts then reframed the resistance itself. Rather than treating engineers as uniquely difficult, ask why any group resists. Too often, Lean has arrived as "we are going to tell you how to do your job differently," and people are right to resist that, whether they are engineers, nurses, or doctors. Greg's practical fix is to structure the first conversation entirely around the work the person already does. Put them at the center as the customer of the improvement, and lead with "we are trying to make your life easier." Ask them to step into your methodology and they tune out. Step into their world and they listen, and the scope of what you work on together widens from there.
Asked how to get associates involved in problem solving, Mark was blunt about what does not work: a memo, a sign, or a single speech. Engagement is an ongoing conversation. Leaders have to leave the office, go to where the work happens, find the people who look frustrated or stuck, and ask what problems they hit today and what bugs them. He added one guardrail. Tie the question back to what the team can actually fix, so it produces improvement rather than a list of complaints.
Greg's contribution was about restraint. When you first bring someone into problem solving, do not treat it as your one chance to teach them everything you know. Handing a newcomer a 250-page book and all of A3 thinking in a single session turns people off, the way being corrected on every word turns off someone learning a new language. Let people do it slightly wrong. Get them engaged in the process, and expertise builds over months and years. Mark agreed and named the larger target: the big-batch training model, a week in a classroom before anyone does anything, is flawed. Teach only as much as people can immediately put into practice. Learn, do, learn, do.
A question asked whether coaching is the key to improving operator performance. Both hosts said yes, and widened it past operators to performance improvement in any role. Greg framed it as a math problem. A thousand-person organization might have an improvement team of one to four people. If those few try to be present for every step, or do the work themselves, they cannot scale their impact. Coaching leaders to become coaches in their own areas scales. Doing the improvement for people does not.
Mark took it one level up: coaching is also how you improve coaching. He has acted as a coach to managers who are themselves coaching their teams, watching whether they ask good questions or inadvertently shut people down. He connected this to habit. A book he had recently read, "The Coaching Habit," argues that coaching has to become a daily routine, and Greg tied that to the cue-routine-benefit loop. A leader who mentors rather than directs gets to run that loop many times over, across many teams, and sees the improvement work compound. The coaching model builds the habit faster than the doing model.
A healthcare attendee asked whether leaders should have their own huddle board. Both hosts said yes without hesitation. Mark has seen senior leadership teams in strong Lean healthcare organizations run a daily management board that mirrors the rest of the organization, with executive-level metrics, the top issues of the day, and new improvement opportunities. The value is not only modeling the behavior. The board helps a leadership team function as a team, rather than as a set of executives who happen to sit near each other.
Greg made the credibility point. It is hard to ask people to do something they never see their leaders do. At KaiNexus, the company runs its own version of strategy deployment. Greg sets his goals and metrics openly in the system, and each function sets goals and a plan that connect to the company's. Organizational habits form faster when senior management visibly practices them, and people can tell the difference between doing it genuinely and doing it for show.
Another question framed standard work and storytelling as competing ways to engage people in a Lean culture. Mark rejected the either/or. He pointed to Training Within Industry, the World War II-era method behind much of Lean's approach to standardized work. What separates a TWI job instruction from an old binder of standard operating procedures is that it explains why a step matters. That moves training past "do it because I said so." Stories do similar work. Greg noted that people remember a story far better than a loose set of facts, and once the why is wrapped in a story, a person can carry it and re-explain it to a colleague.
Mark connected this to a phrase from former Toyota people: improvement has to engage heads and hearts. Something being logically better does not mean people will buy into it. Data matters, and so do stories. He cited a physician leader at a patient safety conference making exactly that case, and Greg pointed to medical education's shift toward case-based teaching, where a patient's story carries the lesson.
An attendee asked for a basic framework for rolling out continuous improvement and translating it into financial returns leaders understand. Greg started with a warning against planning forever and never acting. Do not let perfect get in the way of better. Instead of rolling improvement out to thousands of people at once, break it down: one department, then a few, spreading and iterating with PDSA cycles as you learn. A complex rollout becomes a hundred solvable steps.
On the money question, Mark cautioned against leading with it at the front line. Executives focus on ROI, cost savings, and revenue, but improvement produces other benefits too: customer satisfaction, employee morale, and service quality, all of which eventually reach the bottom line. Stressed staff and high turnover are expensive. Lead with savings at the front line, though, and you kill engagement, because there is no warm feeling in it for the person doing the work. Get people engaged first, and financial impact follows, including the occasional large-impact improvement. Most improvements are modest, and a small share are worth a great deal. Do not step up to bat trying only for a home run. Get on base. Mark closed with classic advice from Masaaki Imai: phase one is simply getting people to participate. Alignment to organizational goals comes later. Push for alignment too early and you lose the participation that makes alignment possible. Underneath all of it is trust, often with people who have watched an improvement program fail before.
The session ended with an attendee planning a Lean healthcare blog, asking what the hosts would do differently. Mark's most tactical answer: buy your own domain from day one. His blog started on a free subdomain with weak branding before he moved it to leanblog.org, and a memorable domain costs about ten dollars even when the hosting is free. His other advice was to publish on a steady, predictable schedule rather than seven posts in a day followed by a month of silence. Level-loading, as it happens, is a Lean idea.
Mark then turned the question on Greg: what about starting a company? Greg's honest answer was that if he had fully understood how hard building an enterprise software product would be, he might not have started. He is glad he took the first step anyway. The lesson mirrors the rest of the episode. Do not try to reason through the whole intimidating path at once. Ask what the next step is, take it, and iterate. KaiNexus itself started from a simple question, what software that supports the behavior in Imai's books would look like, and grew by layering and iterating from there rather than over-planning.
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.
See every episode in the series on the Ask Us Anything main page. Earlier episodes are also available on the KaiNexus YouTube channel and in the KaiNexus podcast archive.
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