Mark Graban opened the session with a joke about sequels — most of them aren't as good as the original. This one, he thought, would be. The first version of this panel had run in June 2020, a few months into the pandemic, when most organizations were still figuring out what virtual continuous improvement work could look like at all. By the time the sequel ran in late July, the field had accumulated enough collective experience to have honest conversations about what was actually working, what wasn't, and where the surprises had landed.
The three panelists Mark assembled covered a useful range. Crystal Y. Davis runs The Lean Coach, working primarily with leadership development across multiple industries. Karen Martin runs TKMG Group, a global consulting firm with a 25-year history that had been distributed and remote since its founding. Mike McGowan directs process excellence at Memorial Health System, a rural health system in Marietta, Ohio. Two consultants with different practice models, one internal practitioner inside a healthcare system actively managing through the pandemic — the mix produced the kind of conversation where each panelist had something different to offer at every question.
What came out across the hour wasn't a methodology. It was a working summary of what experienced practitioners had learned about facilitation, value stream mapping, engagement, productivity measurement, and the deeper question of whether the virtual environment was producing fundamentally different dynamics or just amplifying ones that had always been there. The honest answer, by the end, was both.
Crystal Y. Davis, CLSSBB is the Founder, CEO, and Principal Lean Practitioner at The Lean Coach, Inc. She specializes in the Toyota Way Lean model and helps leaders create cultures of problem-solvers who can deploy strategically. She has over 20 years of proven Lean experience across automotive, beverage, and supply chain industries, with a STEM industry focus and a client roster of Fortune 500 and 1000 companies. She was formally mentored by Toyota senseis and has led companies to award-winning results recognized at the Lean Enterprise Institute Summit and Industry Week Best Plant.
Karen Martin is President of TKMG Group and Founder & President of TKMG Academy. TKMG is a global consulting firm specializing in operational excellence, Lean management, and business performance improvement. Karen is the author or co-author of five business performance books, including two Shingo Award-winning books: "The Outstanding Organization" and "Value Stream Mapping." Her most recent book, "Clarity First," centers on her belief that success in life — business and personal — results from operating with clarity. She has been practicing continuous improvement and operations design for about 30 years, and found Lean in 2000 after years as a Deming advocate.
Mike McGowan, LSSBB, MBOE is the Director of Process Excellence at Marietta Memorial Hospital, part of Memorial Health System — a small rural health system in southeastern Ohio with two hospitals, three emergency departments, and over 200 providers. He directs a team of six MBOE-certified black belts who lead improvement teams, coach leaders, and train frontline staff. He holds a Master of Business in Operational Excellence degree from The Ohio State University.
Mark opened with a deliberately practical question. How much time were each of the panelists spending on video calls each day? The answers landed honestly — eight hours on a busy day, two on a slow one, somewhere between 20 percent and 80 percent of working time depending on the role. None of them had been able to escape the new normal. All of them had been forced to develop the muscles for working effectively through a screen.
The first substantive question was about how facilitation itself had changed. Crystal's answer was direct. The energy you get from being physically together in a Kaizen, with people discussing problems around a conference room, doesn't transfer through a camera. The compensating move is to increase the deliberateness of facilitation — explicitly making sure every voice is heard, explicitly checking in with people whose body language you can't read, explicitly noticing who hasn't spoken in a while. Some team members didn't want to turn their cameras on, and a facilitator has to decide in the moment whether to push or let it be.
Karen had a particularly sharp example. In a recent session with a C-level leader, something significant happened that she almost missed entirely. Another participant called it out, and Karen had to ask the executive to repeat himself so she could see his facial reaction to a suggestion that had been made. The reaction was the data. Without seeing it, she would have moved past a moment that turned out to matter. The lesson she pulled from it: as a facilitator on camera, you have to constantly scan between the camera and the people, between the camera and the people, to keep an accurate read on what the room is actually feeling.
Mike, working inside a healthcare system, had a different observation. His team had started 2020 with a 12-week throughput initiative that went into the freezer when the pandemic hit in mid-March. The challenge wasn't the virtual tools. The challenge was that the people his team needed to work with — nurse leaders, frontline clinicians — were either quarantined, exhausted, or pulled into pandemic response. The improvement work could be done virtually. Getting the right people in the room to do it was the problem.
The conversation moved into virtual value stream mapping, and Karen led with a candid admission. She had been dreading it. Her approach to value stream work depends on senior leadership teams having discovery after discovery after discovery in real time as they map, and the discoveries require fluid back-and-forth conversation that physical proximity makes easier.
She explored Mural and Miro before settling on a different approach. She uses iGrafx FlowCharter — the software TKMG had always used to archive value stream maps — as the live mapping tool, with mouse control shared among participants and screens shared around. Her previous bias had been against creating maps in software at all, strongly preferring paper and post-its and people standing at a wall. The pandemic forced the experiment. It worked better than she had expected.
Her session structure had shifted from three or four full days of mapping to three-hour segments spread across multiple days. The shorter sessions, she said, seemed to be the sweet spot for most senior leadership teams. People can sustain genuine focus in a three-hour virtual session in a way they can't sustain for eight hours. The same fatigue that makes in-person mapping work over multiple days doesn't translate well to camera-based sessions.
A practical tip from another participant came through the chat — Karen Skinner, a friend of Mark's who does Lean work with law firms, had reported success with two adaptations. Putting a physical camera on a wall map with stickies, so the in-person experience could be shared with remote participants. And keeping the team smaller than usual, since virtual sessions seem to handle group size differently than physical ones. Karen Martin's response: her own cap is ten participants for value stream work, and even ten can be a handful. Six to eight, she noted, has produced the best mapping experiences she's facilitated over her career.
Mike added a different angle on virtual mapping. In live sessions where his team is together physically, they've taken to having one facilitator running the conversation and a separate team member building the map electronically in parallel. Both versions exist simultaneously — the sticky-note wall and the digital archive. The pattern adapts naturally to virtual work, with one person facilitating the discussion and another scribing into the software.
A counter-measure for facilitators who aren't strong with the mapping software came up later: pair a facilitator with a dedicated scribe. The facilitator runs the conversation. The scribe captures it in the tool. The division of labor lets each person do what they do best without compromising either.
The question of how to "go see" when you can't physically go anywhere produced a mix of answers.
Mike's team had done some camera-based observation, mostly so he could familiarize himself with work he didn't already know. He'd been asking around about Google Glass and similar headset technologies — the idea of seeing what a frontline worker sees in real time, from anywhere — but hadn't tested anything in production.
A participant in the chat described what their organization had done: virtual gemba walks through GoToMeeting, starting with a 100-person huddle and then breaking into smaller groups for the actual walks. The pattern works because gemba isn't fundamentally about being physically present. It's about being structurally connected to where the work happens — close enough to see the work, ask questions, and respond to what surfaces. Video makes the connection thinner than physical presence, but doesn't eliminate it.
Mike also flagged a related complication. Even when his team could be physically present in the hospital, the gemba had changed. Everyone was in PPE. Everyone was navigating different occupancy limits in conference rooms (Ohio's rule at the time was 50 percent of fire occupancy to maintain social distancing). Trainings that used to be hands-on had to be redesigned for virtual delivery. The "new gemba" required adaptation regardless of whether anyone was working remotely.
Mark surfaced a question every facilitator running virtual sessions had encountered by mid-2020. What do you do when participants won't turn their cameras on?
Karen had a story she was almost embarrassed to tell. She'd run a two-day in-person workshop that had been spread across five days in two-to-three-hour virtual segments. The participants were 24 directors-and-above, including one C-level. Half of them refused to turn their cameras on for the first three or four hours. She tried asking gently — "I'd love to be able to see you." One person complied. She asked the client to ask. No one moved. Eventually the senior VP who sponsored the engagement said directly that the discussion required eye contact, and asked everyone to come prepared the next day with cameras on. Most did. Some still refused. Karen let it be.
Her observation across the experience: when someone won't turn their camera on, they're also creating space to check out, do something else, multitask. The facilitator can push, but there are limits to how hard the push works. Some of the resolution comes from prepping people in advance — explaining the norms before the session rather than during it. Some of it comes from setting expectations explicitly — is this a tie-and-blazer meeting or a baseball-cap-and-t-shirt meeting? Are people allowed to use virtual backgrounds? What if someone has contractors in the house or a baby crying or a fire truck going by? Setting the rules ahead of time reduces the friction in the moment.
Crystal added that people may also need help with the technology — knowing how to set up virtual backgrounds if their physical space is a problem, knowing how to mute themselves, knowing how to use breakout rooms. What looks like camera-shyness sometimes is actually unfamiliarity with the tools.
A question came in from Bill — his team's improvement projects had been put on hold during the pandemic, and he was trying to get them started up again. Mike, working inside a healthcare system, had been navigating exactly this challenge in real time.
His honest answer: it's hard. Pull always works better than push. When leaders are engaged and saying clearly "we need to do this," people will engage. When the organization is still in survival mode — staff worried about themselves and their families, throughput pressure mounting, COVID numbers creeping back up — improvement work tends to land on the back burner. Mike's team had seen a rise in activity in June when the first wave receded, then a slowdown as the second wave approached.
The mechanism that works, Mike said, is getting senior leaders involved and connecting the work to a clear "why." If throughput is degrading and patients are starting to board in the ED, the improvement work isn't optional — it's the difference between bad outcomes and acceptable ones. The why has to be real and concrete, not abstract.
Karen pulled in a quote she attributed (with some uncertainty) to Henry Ford: it's striking how organizations don't make time to solve problems but keep finding time to deal with them over and over. Her response is to make the math visible. Calculate the actual hands-on time required to deal with the problem in its current state. Calculate the time it would take to solve it. Compare the cost of two days spent fixing the problem against the cost of dealing with it twenty times a week for a year. The comparison is usually compelling. People's bias toward avoiding the upfront investment of fixing things is its own form of waste — one that compounds.
Crystal added a framing from her manufacturing background. She noted that traditional manufacturing wisdom was to avoid running continuous improvement in unstable environments — to stabilize first, then improve. The pandemic created enough instability that organizations had to re-evaluate whether they had returned to the level of stability where improvement work made sense. They also had to be willing to re-prioritize. The pain point a year ago might not be the pain point now. As Crystal put it: if my toe hurts, I don't want you to give me a facial. I want you to fix my toe. The work has to address what's actually hurting now, not what was on the project list six months ago.
Crystal addressed a question about measuring productivity in remote work with characteristic directness.
A number of organizations she had been working with had become extremely tactical about productivity measurement — to the point of tracking keystrokes, measuring computer activity, requiring daily checklists at the start of each day with sign-offs at the end. When she asked these organizations whether they had done any of this before the pandemic, the answer was no.
The phenomenon she described was an anxiety-driven overreach. Managers couldn't see their people working, so they invented mechanisms to verify that work was happening. The mechanisms were often unhelpful. Crystal's challenge to leaders: most of you never look at the data you're collecting. The collection itself is taxing on the people submitting it. The behavior signals distrust to a workforce that has, in most cases, continued performing well through the disruption.
Her recommendation was structural rather than tactical. Use the huddle process. At the start of the week, check in on what matters this week — the critical work to focus on. In the daily huddle, look in the rearview mirror briefly to surface anything slipping, then move forward. The leading indicators that would tell you productivity is slipping are visible through huddles long before any keystroke tracker would flag them, and the conversation is dignified rather than surveillance-flavored.
Karen added an example from a current client. The client was concerned about productivity and capacity for an anticipated demand increase. Karen had them do a three-day time study. The actual time required to complete the work was so far off from what the schedule represented that there was no realistic way for staff to hit the productivity targets the schedule implied. The fix wasn't to push the staff harder. The fix was either to eliminate tasks that didn't need to be done, tighten up the process design, or — as a last resort — hire more people. The lesson: organizations set productivity targets all the time without genuinely understanding what the work requires. Until you've done a real time study and looked at the actual current state, your productivity targets are guesses.
Tyrone asked an interesting question through the chat. Are there efficiency advantages to virtual work — breakout rooms forming instantly, no time wasted moving people physically between rooms, less small talk?
Karen's honest answer was that the data was mixed and she didn't fully understand it yet. Some virtual sessions had completed in roughly half the time the equivalent in-person sessions would have taken. When she asked clients if they felt anything had been lost in the speed, they consistently said no — the work had gotten done and they hadn't experienced a deficit. The compression appeared to be real.
But value stream current-state mapping, specifically, was going slower virtually than it would have in person. The compacted, overlapping discussion that happens when people are huddled around a wall doesn't translate well to camera-based interaction where people have to take turns speaking. Whatever virtual sessions were saving on overhead, they were losing on the kind of rapid discovery that physical proximity enables.
Mike's contribution was more focused. He thought meetings were going faster largely because nobody wanted to be on camera any longer than necessary. The motivation to wrap up was its own form of efficiency. Whether that's a healthy dynamic or just a negative motivator producing temporarily good results, he was less sure.
The thread underneath all of this, Mark observed, is that virtual work isn't uniformly faster or slower than in-person work. It's structurally different, and the differences favor some activities and disadvantage others. Discovery-heavy work that depends on overlapping conversation suffers. Decision-making meetings with clear agendas and well-prepared participants accelerate. Knowing which kind of work you're doing helps you design the session for the medium.
Mark closed with a final round-robin asking each panelist to share something that had genuinely surprised them about virtual continuous improvement work.
Crystal's observation was sharp. People expect that virtual work will be qualitatively different from in-person work, but it isn't. The dynamics that existed before the pandemic still exist now — they're just amplified. Teams that struggled with relating and connecting and trust struggle more virtually. Teams that had strong relationships continue to. Virtual work doesn't manufacture what wasn't there before. The expectation that camera-based work would magically produce different patterns of human interaction was misplaced. The patterns are the patterns. The medium reveals them more starkly.
Karen's observation was about how people behave differently on camera than in person. There's an element of acting that happens when eyeballs are on the camera that doesn't happen on day three of a three-day workshop in a conference room where everyone has fully relaxed. People don't relax into who they really are when they're being filmed. As a facilitator, this means scanning continuously for signs of what's actually happening beneath the surface performance, and drawing out the genuine reactions that the camera tends to smooth over.
Mike's reflection was about meetings themselves. The virtual format had genuinely produced more efficient meetings — getting things done and getting off camera. But the body-language signals everyone had relied on in person were thinner now, and the practitioners who navigated virtual work well were going to be the ones who learned to read the new signals. There's going to be a new normal, he said. The question is whether organizations are willing to learn what the new normal actually requires rather than treating virtual work as a temporary deviation from a pre-pandemic baseline they expect to return to.
The thread that runs through the panel discussion is that virtual continuous improvement isn't fundamentally a technology problem. It's a leadership and facilitation problem that the technology environment exposes more clearly than the physical environment did. Crystal's observation about virtual work amplifying pre-existing dynamics applies broadly. The trust deficits that existed before the pandemic are sharper now. The engagement problems that were there before remain. The facilitation weaknesses that physical proximity could partially cover for are now visible.
What infrastructure does in this context is reduce the structural friction that makes virtual improvement work harder than it needs to be. Mike's team uses KaiNexus to track the kind of pandemic response data — daily staff call-offs, COVID indicators, PPE supply — that needed to be visible to leadership across a dispersed organization in real time. The control chart functionality he described let his team distinguish between actual signals (a real shift in staff illness) and routine noise (Monday numbers always being higher than Sunday numbers because of how the weekend staffing scheduled). Without the structured visibility, every uptick produced an overreaction. With it, leaders could see what was happening clearly enough to act on real signals and ignore the noise.
The huddle pattern Crystal recommended for managing remote productivity depends on having something to huddle around. Virtual huddles work when there's a shared structure visible to everyone — metrics, current improvement work, what's stuck, what needs decisions. Without that shared structure, virtual huddles devolve into status meetings that everyone wants to escape. With it, they retain the function they served in physical environments: surfacing problems quickly, deciding what matters today, and keeping the team aligned without micromanagement.
The mapping work Karen described — running senior leadership teams through value stream mapping in three-hour virtual segments — requires the kind of digital artifact that survives the session. The map has to be in something. The "in something" matters because the next session picks up where the last one ended, and the participants have to be able to see the cumulative current state to add to it. Whether that's iGrafx, KaiNexus, Mural, Miro, or another tool isn't the point. The point is that the artifact has to persist, has to be shared, and has to be accessible to the team between sessions.
None of this changes what the panelists were teaching. The facilitation is the facilitation. The scanning for camera reactions is the scanning. The pulling people out of camera-off invisibility is the pulling. The time study that reveals real productivity is still the time study. What infrastructure does is keep the work from getting lost across sessions and across the distance between team members who used to share a room and now share a video grid.
Does virtual work make continuous improvement easier or harder? Both, depending on the activity. Decision-making meetings with clear agendas and prepared participants tend to run faster virtually. Discovery-heavy work that depends on overlapping conversation — value stream current-state mapping was Karen's example — tends to run slower. The differences are structural rather than universal. Knowing which kind of work you're doing helps you design the session for the medium.
How should facilitators adjust their style for virtual work? Be more deliberate about everything. Explicitly check in with people whose body language you can't read. Explicitly call on people who haven't spoken. Scan continuously between the camera and the participants to catch reactions you'd otherwise miss. Set explicit ground rules at the start of sessions about cameras, attire, interruptions, and side conversations. The signals that physical proximity makes ambient have to be made explicit in virtual settings.
What do you do about participants who won't turn their cameras on? Ask once. Have the client or sponsor reinforce the ask if needed. Beyond that, let it be — pushing harder usually doesn't work, and the reasons for camera-off are sometimes legitimate (technology limitations, home environment concerns, accessibility needs). Karen noted that some camera-off participants are also creating space to multitask or check out, and the facilitator may need to factor that into how they engage the rest of the session.
How do you do virtual value stream mapping when discussion-heavy real-time mapping is the whole point? Karen's approach: use the software you normally use for archiving as the live mapping tool (in her case iGrafx FlowCharter), share screen and mouse control among participants, run sessions in three-hour segments rather than full days, and keep the group smaller than you might in person. Mike's approach: pair a facilitator with a separate scribe, so the facilitator can run the discussion while the scribe captures it in the tool. Karen Skinner's approach (mentioned in the chat): put a physical camera on a wall map with stickies and keep the team smaller than usual. All three work. The common thread is acknowledging that virtual mapping requires different session design than physical mapping.
How can you go to the gemba virtually? Through video calls, smartphone cameras held up at the workplace, scheduled walk-alongs over GoToMeeting or Teams or Zoom, and increasingly through purpose-built tools like camera-equipped glasses. One webinar participant described their organization doing virtual gemba walks for over 100 people, starting with a large huddle and then breaking into smaller groups. The gemba isn't fundamentally about being physically present. It's about being structurally connected to where the work happens, close enough to see it and ask about it and respond to what surfaces. Video makes the connection thinner than physical presence but doesn't eliminate it.
How do you measure productivity in a remote workforce? Crystal's strong recommendation is to avoid the tactical overreach that many organizations defaulted to — keystroke tracking, daily activity checklists, computer monitoring. Most of the data being collected isn't being looked at, the collection is taxing on the people submitting it, and it signals distrust to people who in most cases are continuing to perform well. Use huddles instead. Start the week with what matters. Daily huddles surface leading indicators of any slipping. The conversation is dignified and the information is more actionable than what monitoring software produces.
How do you balance pushing improvement work forward against teams that are exhausted and overwhelmed? Mike's answer: pull works better than push. If leaders are genuinely engaged and the work is tied to a real "why" — patient throughput, safety, something that matters concretely now — people will engage. If the work is being pushed without leadership commitment and without a real why, it will lose to whatever else is on people's plates. Karen's contribution: make the math visible. Calculate the actual cost of continuing to deal with the problem versus the cost of fixing it. The comparison is usually compelling, and it surfaces the bias toward dealing-with-it that's its own form of waste.
Does virtual work really go faster than in-person work? Sometimes significantly. Karen reported some virtual sessions completing in roughly half the time the equivalent in-person sessions would have taken, with clients reporting no sense of loss in the speed. Mike noted that virtual meetings tend to be more focused because people want to get off camera. But not uniformly — value stream current-state mapping was going slower for Karen virtually than in person, because the overlapping discussion that physical proximity enables doesn't translate well to camera-based interaction. The speed advantage is real but uneven.
What did Crystal mean by "you can't manufacture what wasn't there before"? That virtual work doesn't create relational dynamics that didn't exist in the physical environment. Teams that struggled with trust, communication, or engagement before the pandemic struggle more now. Teams with strong relationships sustain them. The medium amplifies pre-existing patterns rather than creating new ones. The implication for leaders: the work to build genuine team relationships, trust, and engagement is the same work it always was. Virtual environments expose it more starkly but don't change its fundamentals.
How do you handle the "performance" element Karen identified — that people behave differently on camera than in person? Recognize that participants on camera are operating under a kind of social performance pressure that doesn't fully release the way day-three-of-a-workshop release happens in person. As a facilitator, scan continuously for the genuine reactions beneath the surface performance. Notice when something lands differently than it appears to. Be willing to slow down, repeat questions, and draw out reactions that the camera tends to smooth over. The goal isn't to make people behave the same way they would in person — it's to read the signals correctly given that they're behaving differently.
What about virtual icebreakers and engagement activities? Crystal had run a GIF challenge during the early pandemic — participants found and shared GIFs that expressed how they were feeling about remote work and the pandemic, with voting on the best ones and a small prize for the winner. It loosened people up and surfaced what was actually going on for people. Other panel participants mentioned virtual background challenges, zoom bingo, and a "moment of zen" practice — one minute of silent presence at the start of each call to center the group. Mark's reflection on the latter: the internet distraction machine is at everyone's fingertips during virtual meetings, and explicit practices to bring people fully present may matter more now than in physical settings where the distraction is harder to access.
How does coaching work virtually? Karen noted that TKMG has been doing problem-solving coaching virtually since long before the pandemic, and that A3 reports — used as originally intended as coaching tools — work well in virtual settings. The coachee submits the A3 in advance, the coach gets their thinking wrapped around where the coachee is, and the coaching conversation focuses on the right questions to help them get unstuck. Crystal added a complementary tactic: micro-coaching in 10-to-15-minute segments rather than longer sessions, which keeps coachees connected to new behaviors they're trying to build. The shorter, more frequent cadence works better virtually than the longer, less frequent cadence that physical settings tolerated.
.svg)
Copyright © 2026
Privacy Policy