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The session was recorded in June 2020, roughly three months into the COVID-19 shutdown for most of the United States. The question it set out to answer was direct: when teams can't gather around a whiteboard, walk the floor together, or run a traditional kaizen event in a conference room, does continuous improvement have to stop?
The answer the panel delivered was a clear no — but with substantial nuance about what actually changes, what works, what doesn't, and what experienced practitioners would do differently next time.
Mark Graban moderated. The three panelists came from three different operating contexts. Chris Burnham at Wright Medical leads a global employee-driven continuous improvement program at a medical device manufacturer where most of the actual production work can't be done from home. Tyler Clements at AcenTek leads CI for an independent telecommunications company in southeastern Minnesota that serves roughly 20,000 internet subscribers, with office staff who pivoted from fully in-office to fully remote in roughly two weeks. Mohamed Saleh runs Vizibility LLC, an executive Lean advisory practice, and had just facilitated a fully virtual five-day kaizen event two weeks before the webinar.
The session was deliberately PowerPoint-free after the opening introductions. The format was working-practitioner conversation. The panelists named what they had actually done, what worked, what surprised them, and what they would change. The session is most useful as a reference for practitioners trying to make the same adaptations, not as a theoretical framework for virtual improvement work.
Chris Burnham is Senior Lean Strategy Director at KaiNexus. At the time of the webinar he was Continuous Improvement Program Manager at Wright Medical, with eighteen years of experience applying, teaching, and leading continuous improvement principles across a variety of industries. He is the former host and producer of The Lean Leadership Podcast. He resides in Memphis, Tennessee.
Tyler Clements is Customer Experience Analyst at AcenTek and leads the company's continuous improvement program. He has 15 years of combined experience in the telecommunications and financial education industries, with roles spanning customer service, sales, and continuous improvement. AcenTek is an independent telecommunications company based in southeastern Minnesota, serving roughly 20,000 internet subscribers across three states. Tyler serves as the Education Chair on the Board of Directors for 7 Rivers Lean Consortium, where his primary responsibility is providing learning and networking opportunities for Lean organizations in the 7 Rivers region.
Dr. Mohamed Saleh is founder and principal at Vizibility LLC and a managing partner at the M+ Group. He has roughly two decades of hands-on Lean experience, primarily in healthcare with recent expansion into other industries. He holds a Doctorate in Business Administration and teaches at both the School of Engineering & Technology Management at Central Connecticut State University and the MBA School at Elms College. His distinguishing focus is on understanding what principles organizations are striving for and designing the architecture and behaviors that complement those principles — combining complexity thinking, distributive leadership, and people-centered organizational change.
The opening segment surfaced the contrast between the three contexts.
Mohamed described his initial reaction as "drastically" — though by the time of the webinar it felt like it was settling. The shift required substantial technology adaptation. He had to buy a microphone, subscribe to new platforms (Zoom, MURAL, Asana, Google Drive), and rethink how to coach virtually when his prior practice was built around flying out to clients and coaching in person. The shift involved many small subscriptions and many small reconfigurations of how the work actually happened day-to-day.
Tyler described AcenTek's pivot in operational terms. The company had been in business for 70 years with essentially every office employee working from the office every day. Over the course of about two weeks as businesses started closing, AcenTek went from all office personnel in the office to working remotely. Some employees stayed in the office, but the majority moved to home work. Tyler's framing: COVID forced AcenTek to expedite plans they had been discussing for years. The forced acceleration produced clarity on the unique challenges of each position, the preferred outcomes of each role, and how to gauge success in a virtual environment. The shift surfaced a deeper change in how the company thinks about work — moving from observing whether people were at their desks to focusing on the outputs and results of their work. The phrase Tyler used: "It's no longer about where you worked but how you were working and what the quality of the work itself was."
Chris's framing emphasized what hadn't changed. Wright Medical's mission and purpose were unchanged. The customers — patients receiving Wright Medical's devices — still depended on the company. Chris personally had been used to working in many different places, so working from home wasn't a primary or unfamiliar work mode. What changed was that the environmental shift forced everyone into the perspective-shift that Lean coaches are always asking for anyway. The principles of continuous improvement were unchanged. The application required figuring out new approaches. Chris's tactical point on staying connected: when a problem comes up, don't send email — buzz the colleague for a video chat. The video maintains the sense of community and also holds people accountable for their words, deeds, and actions in a way email doesn't.
The panelists used different combinations of tools, with substantial overlap.
Chris and Tyler both work primarily in Microsoft Teams, partly because both organizations had Microsoft 365 in place before the shutdown. Teams provides the video conferencing, the persistent chat channels, the file sharing, and integration with the broader Microsoft suite (Visio for mapping, PowerPoint for collaborative documents, Planner for task management, Power BI for analytics, Flow/Power Automate for workflow). Tyler also uses Lucidchart for some sharing and collaboration work. Chris emphasized that Teams isn't just a meeting tool — the suite of integrated tools inside Teams enables substantially more than video calls.
Mohamed uses Zoom primarily, with MURAL as his collaboration whiteboard, Asana for task tracking, and Google Drive for file sharing. The Zoom breakout room feature is what distinguished it from other platforms in his use. He likes seeing everyone's face on screen simultaneously, which Zoom's gallery view supports well. He still uses a physical flip chart behind his desk for some note-taking — old-school habit that persisted because some forms of capture work better that way regardless of the digital environment.
The honest assessment: any of the major platforms can support the work. The choice tends to be driven by what the organization already has in place and what the individual practitioner is comfortable with. The substantive work isn't in the platform choice. It's in what the practitioner does with the platform.
The principle of "go and see" — going to the actual place where the work happens — is foundational to Lean. Doing it virtually requires adaptation.
Tyler walked through AcenTek's approach. The company's value stream involves both office work (information and data flow, which is straightforward to observe in shared screens) and field work (technicians physically present at customer homes or businesses to install modems, routers, and set-top boxes). The field work has always been harder to gemba even pre-COVID — you can't just round up a team and pop into someone's house unannounced.
AcenTek's adaptation: technicians download the video conferencing app on their smartphones and join the team meeting from the customer site. The technician walks the team through what they're seeing, video-only. The office team can observe what's actually happening at the customer premise without anyone needing to drive there. Tyler flagged the practical constraint — the technicians need good headphones to communicate while showing video, and cellular service or customer Wi-Fi has to be adequate for the video stream. The approach isn't right for small issues. For substantial troubleshooting that would otherwise require engineering involvement and multiple trips, it works well.
The technique generalizes. Any operation where some of the work happens at physical sites the improvement team can't easily access — manufacturing floors, hospital units, field service, retail locations — can use smartphone-based video gemba as a substitute when the in-person visit isn't possible. The asynchronous version (record video, share it for later review) has been possible for years. The synchronous version (live video call with someone on site) is what the platforms now support reliably enough to be operationally useful.
Tyler's practical caution: check with the organization's legal and compliance team before doing this with customer information or proprietary processes. The platforms work. The legal framework around recording, sharing, and retention may have constraints worth understanding upfront.
The session's most substantial material came from Mohamed walking through his recent five-day fully virtual kaizen event — which he had been skeptical of in advance and had learned substantial lessons from in practice.
He admitted to having been one of the skeptics in the Lean community who said virtual kaizen events couldn't work — that the human element would be lost, the emotions wouldn't translate, the people side of the work would be diminished. A client pushed for the event anyway. Mohamed agreed and went in to learn.
Sponsorship commitment matters more, not less. In a physical kaizen, sponsorship commitment is important. In a virtual kaizen, it's more important because the virtual environment introduces more distractions and more ways for the work to fragment. If the sponsor isn't genuinely committed, the virtual event won't survive.
Data gathering changes substantially. In a physical pre-kaizen, the facilitator walks the floor, observes the process directly, measures things personally, and follows individual cases through the system. In a virtual pre-kaizen, the facilitator has to rely on the data the organization's systems produce. The accuracy of that data became a substantial debate during the kaizen itself — time that would have been avoided if the facilitator had been able to do the direct observation. Mohamed's note: if doing this again, build in more time for pre-event data validation, since the post-hoc accuracy debate consumes kaizen-week time the team can't afford.
Stakeholder interviewing is harder. When walking the floor pre-kaizen, the facilitator gets a feel for who's passionate, who's resistant, who has pride in the current state that might make them difficult to work with. In the virtual pre-kaizen, those signals are harder to read. Mohamed only discovered some of the team dynamics during the kaizen itself, which he would have caught earlier in a physical pre-event.
Team size needs to shrink. In physical kaizens, a team of 16 is workable with skilled facilitators. In virtual kaizens, that's too many. Mohamed's recommendation from the experience: 12 maximum. The constraint isn't theoretical — it's operational. Virtual environments produce more friction in coordinating large groups, less ability to read body language, more difficulty maintaining engagement across many participants simultaneously.
Technology orientation is non-negotiable. Mohamed ran a pre-kaizen training the week before the event, focused not on the improvement tools but on the technology itself — getting people comfortable with MURAL, with Zoom breakouts, with the basic mechanics of the virtual environment. Some of the participants were shop floor employees without prior experience in these platforms. The pre-event training meant they showed up to the kaizen ready to do the work rather than struggling with the tools while trying to do the work. Mohamed said he got lucky that they did this — some participants had complained in advance and the complaints prompted the training. He recommends it as standard practice regardless of whether participants complain, because the alternative is losing kaizen-week time to learning the tools.
The opening time was substantially wasted on technology comfort and ground rules — more than Mohamed would have predicted. He recommends building this in deliberately rather than treating it as overhead.
Virtual engagement is more focused, not less. Mohamed's surprise observation: when everyone is on screen, everyone is visibly looking at the speaker, which produces more focused attention than physical settings where people sit in the back, look away, check their phones, or otherwise disengage. Whatever was lost in the opening warm-up was gained back through the higher per-minute engagement during the working time.
Ground rules become critical. It's easier to speak over each other on Zoom than in person, and the facilitator has to manage that actively. Mohamed had to stop early in the event and add ground rules he hadn't anticipated needing. The facilitator option of muting participants ended up being more useful than expected. The raise-hand feature in Zoom was particularly valuable — it made the queue of who wanted to speak visible to the facilitator in a way that physical settings, where someone in the back might be missed, often don't.
You need just as many facilitators as in person, maybe more. Mohamed initially thought that because everyone was on the same screen he wouldn't need as many co-facilitators. He was wrong. He got lucky because two of the participants — strong CI practitioners — effectively became co-facilitators during the event, and one of his master's students who was also strong at facilitation supported the work. Without those three, the team size would have been unmanageable. The lesson: plan facilitator capacity for a virtual kaizen as if it were a physical kaizen, not as if the virtual format reduces facilitation needs.
Create extra breakout rooms in advance. Mohamed's first day, he created exactly the four breakout rooms he thought he'd need. Then he realized Zoom doesn't easily allow adding more rooms once breakouts are configured. The workaround for the rest of the event: create seven or eight rooms even if you only initially fill four. When two participants need a side conversation about something specific, you can pull them into an empty room without disrupting the main work or having to tear down and rebuild the breakout configuration.
Keep a physical post-it pad behind you. Mohamed found that participants wanted to see ideas captured physically, not just in the digital MURAL workspace. He had to keep repeating that ideas had been captured because the participants couldn't see the digital capture in real time the way they would see post-its on a wall. His recommendation for future virtual kaizens: facilitators each keep a physical pad behind them for visible capture. It looks strange and feels old-school, but it solves a real coordination problem.
Breakout room sizes of three or four are ideal. Mohamed noticed that breakout rooms of three or four people were dramatically more productive than larger ones. Threes were the sweet spot — those teams identified root causes, generated countermeasures, tested them, and reported back efficiently. Larger breakout rooms reproduced the problems of larger plenary discussions.
One of Mohamed's most operationally useful insights came from applying quick changeover concepts to the kaizen itself. Quick changeover (SMED) distinguishes between internal tasks (must be done with the machine stopped) and external tasks (can be done while the machine runs). Mohamed applied the same distinction to the kaizen work: which parts of the improvement work require physical presence, and which parts can be done virtually?
The team did everything that could be done virtually in the five-day virtual event. The work requiring physical presence at the plant was deferred to the 30-day report-out. In COVID times, that physical follow-up still wasn't possible. In non-COVID times, Mohamed sees this hybrid format as a permanent improvement — three days virtual, two days on-site — that saves substantial cost (travel, hotels, lost productivity from extended client absence) while preserving the work that genuinely requires physical presence.
The implication generalizes. Virtual kaizen isn't a COVID adaptation that goes away when conditions return to normal. It's a new tool in the kaizen toolkit that, used selectively for the right kinds of work, produces better outcomes than either pure-physical or pure-virtual approaches.
The 30-day report-out changes character in a virtual kaizen. It's no longer just a follow-up on the kaizen newspaper items. There's substantive physical work that still needs to be done — work that couldn't happen during the virtual event itself. The post-kaizen becomes more like a mini-kaizen of its own, with its own testing, its own iteration, its own outputs. Mohamed's planning assumption for future virtual kaizens: budget the post-event physical phase as one or two additional days rather than as a brief wrap-up meeting.
A practical question from the audience: did the length of the kaizen day need to shorten for virtual format?
Chris's experience: roughly two hours is about as far as people can effectively go on a single virtual session. The format works as multiple two-hour blocks with substantial breaks between them rather than as continuous full-day sessions. Setting expectations explicitly — "we're going to go for two hours" — helps participants stay engaged, and the explicit framing also gives people permission to step away if something at home requires their attention. Chris's framing: "We have to offer a lot of grace right now. Everything's different for folks." Dogs, kids, spouses also working from home, all the realities of remote work intrude on the kaizen, and the practitioner has to accept that intrusion rather than fight it.
Chris also noted the "nonverbal overload" of seeing everyone's face simultaneously on a Teams call. In a conference room, you don't see the people in your periphery. In a video call, every face is visible at full attention. For practitioners not used to it, the input volume is substantial.
The session spent substantial time on virtual process mapping techniques, which the audience asked about repeatedly.
Tyler's approach: start with whatever tools the organization already has rather than purchasing new software. AcenTek uses Visio for mapping and Office 365 for collaborative editing. The standard approach is a screen share of the mapping software while the facilitator moves shapes around based on what participants describe. The problem Tyler ran into: the facilitator-only approach produces substantial rework and miscommunication. "Often I would misunderstand somebody about what the process was or where it should go. In person you just say, 'come up here and show me where this should go.' You can't do that virtually."
Tyler's solution: use PowerPoint's real-time collaborative editing instead. Load a PowerPoint file with shape templates pre-placed on the left side of the screen. Have all participants open the file simultaneously and edit collaboratively. Each participant can move shapes themselves, contribute pieces of the map directly, and see what others are doing in real time. The PowerPoint flag indicators show when someone is actively editing a particular element, which prevents conflicts. The experience went from "one person moving things while everyone watches" to "everyone building the map together." Engagement improved. Accuracy improved. Learning improved. The mechanism works in Google Slides and Keynote as well, depending on what the organization has access to.
Mark added the same insight from a healthcare client he was working with — they had used Google Sheets the same way, with multiple participants simultaneously editing a shared document. The principle generalizes across platforms: whatever tool the organization already has that supports real-time collaborative editing can serve as a virtual mapping workspace.
Mohamed's complementary approach: MURAL as the primary collaborative whiteboard. The team initially considered Google Jamboard but found that the mapping icons weren't pre-installed and the post-it features were limited. MURAL had the snap features and shape libraries comparable to Visio, plus the multi-participant simultaneous editing. The team's mapping time was cut roughly in half. Participants typed their own contributions, which eliminated the spelling and transcription back-and-forth that happens when one facilitator types for everyone.
Both Tyler and Mohamed flagged the same operational warning: don't use connectors until the end. The connectors (the lines between process steps) attach to shapes in ways that produce substantial rework when shapes are subsequently moved. The workflow that works: get all the shapes placed first, then add connectors as a finishing step. MURAL has an auto-connect feature that completes the connectors automatically once shapes are in place — Mohamed didn't know about it during his kaizen and did the connectors manually, but it's available for practitioners who want it.
Chris walked through Wright Medical's tiered huddle structure and how it adapted to the virtual environment.
The structure is layered. Tier 1 huddles happen closest to the product — at the cell level on the shop floor. Tier 2 huddles aggregate several cells under a supervisor. Tier 3 huddles are at the management level. Tier 4 is senior site leadership. The huddles integrate through escalation paths (items that need to move up the chain) and cascade paths (communication that needs to flow down). The agenda at each level covers safety, quality, delivery, cost, the internal Spark improvement program (See, Plan, Act, Review, Keep improving), and reward and recognition.
The Tier 1 and Tier 2 huddles, closest to the product, continued in person because the work being huddled about happens in person. The Tier 3 and Tier 4 huddles, where the people involved could work remotely, moved to virtual format to protect the health and safety of people closest to the production.
Two lessons emerged from the shift.
The quality of the meeting is the quality of the people, not the quality of the structure. Chris's framing: "Just saying you have a structure doesn't... it's like having a house without furniture in it. It's bare-bones, it's kind of boring, and no one wants to live there." The structure and agenda matter. The discussion within the structure matters more. The shift to virtual surfaced this because the structure carries less weight when the room isn't there to reinforce it.
Senior leaders who can't be physically present have to learn to ask better questions. The pre-COVID practice of dropping in on a huddle and getting a feel for what was happening doesn't work in virtual format. The senior leader has to engage with specific signals — a metric that's off-target, a recurring escalation, a pattern in the discussion — and ask questions that surface what was discussed. The discipline of better questions emerged from the constraint of not being able to passively observe. It's a constraint that improved leadership practice rather than degrading it.
Mohamed's most consistent observation about virtual coaching: empathy has to come first, and the problem has to come second. In some coaching calls during the early COVID months, he never got to the problem at all. The conversation was about how the person was doing, how the family was doing, who was sick, what they were navigating. That was the appropriate use of the time.
The reasoning was practical, not soft. Virtual coaching can't read body language the way in-person coaching can. The coachee is already operating outside their comfort zone simply by being virtual. Pushing them further out of comfort in service of solving the problem is counterproductive if they're not in a state to receive the push. The coach's job during crisis is to keep the person motivated to take small steps, not to maximize the immediate problem-solving output.
Chris took a different angle but reached a complementary conclusion. He uses Training Within Industry's Job Relations card in his one-on-one coaching sessions, and his team holds him accountable to using it. The card's principles — let each worker know how they're doing, give credit when due, tell people about changes that will affect them, work with them to accept change, make the best use of each person's ability — are particularly important in virtual environments where the casual reinforcement of in-person work has disappeared. People need to hear "good job" explicitly because they're not getting it implicitly from the in-person interactions that used to carry it.
Chris's "no surprises" rule for his team matters more in virtual contexts. The casual hallway conversations where news would surface organically don't happen. The team has to substitute deliberate communication for organic. Within his team, news flows up and down without filtering for "good" or "bad" — it's just news, and the team's expectation is that they share it.
Chris also told a story that illustrated how virtual visibility creates coaching opportunities that didn't exist before. An employee in his organization had never been a meeting scribe before but was assigned the role. She went to the LinkedIn Learning platform her company subscribed to, looked up training on being a good meeting scribe, self-trained for thirty minutes, and came back to do the work well. The lesson Chris drew: don't limit people's ability to self-direct. They'll surprise you. Virtual environments make this easier in some ways because the on-demand learning resources are right there on the same laptop the person is using for everything else.
Mohamed had pivoted his M+ Group's conference to virtual format three weeks after the COVID shutdown started. The lessons from that pivot:
Hire a moderator who knows the platform deeply. Mohamed and the team didn't fully understand the platform's capabilities at the start. They brought in a moderator with substantial virtual experience to handle the technical backbone of the event. Without that, the team would have been doing technical troubleshooting instead of facilitating the conference itself.
Have a dedicated question-fielder. Separate role from the moderator. The question-fielder watches for incoming questions in chat and Q&A while the moderator runs the event, so the speakers don't get interrupted by question management.
Networking has to be built in deliberately. Mohamed's premise: many people attend conferences to learn, to give back, and to network. The virtual format removes the casual networking that happens around an in-person conference. To preserve it, the team baked networking time into the schedule between sessions. They cut session length from 50 minutes to 25 minutes to make room. They created breakout rooms for topic-based networking conversations and kept the general room open for unstructured conversation. After every two 25-minute sessions, the schedule allocated a half-hour for networking. The format worked. Attendees specifically called out the networking time as one of the highest-value parts of the conference.
Pivot to what the audience needs, not what you planned to teach. Mohamed's team had a full conference agenda planned pre-COVID. After consulting with partners including Crystal Davis, they realized the planned content wasn't what attendees actually needed in the moment. They sent apology emails, replanned the conference around "how do you lead during crisis," and ran the new agenda instead. Every attendee they heard from appreciated the pivot.
The session itself surfaced how the panelists were using KaiNexus during the virtual period.
Tyler's framing: "KaiNexus facilitates all of our continuous improvement." AcenTek accesses KaiNexus through Microsoft Teams with single sign-on, which eliminates password friction and keeps the work where the team already is. The platform handles the project management for improvement work, the idea submission and routing, the hierarchy of escalation based on impact, and the reporting on outcomes. Tyler emphasized one specific use case for the virtual period: monitoring engagement. The platform shows who's logging in, who's submitting ideas, who's active. People who haven't been in the system for a while become visible to their leaders as a potential coaching opportunity — "is something going on for this person that we should check in about?" The visibility prevents the silent disengagement that virtual environments can otherwise produce.
Chris's framing was similar. The Wright Medical sites that are most productive in the virtual environment are the ones logging into the platform every day. They have groups of CI champions who meet every other week for an hour virtually, reviewing the improvement pipeline together — what came in new, what's planned, what's active, what's overdue. Chris described the meeting as "almost like a rapid kaizen for the site" where multiple items get worked on collaboratively in a safe, nurturing environment. The platform provides the working surface that lets a distributed team review and act on a shared portfolio of work.
Both Tyler and Chris emphasized the recognition function. Chris's team uses the Honor Roll feature to surface improvements that deserve broader visibility, then does follow-up videos with the people who made the improvements — short cell phone recordings where the person tells the story in their own words, distributed globally. The recognition matters more in virtual environments because the in-person reinforcement isn't available, and the platform's visibility of who did what makes the recognition operationally easy.
Where infrastructure connects to the broader virtual practice the session covered: the work the panelists described — going to gemba via smartphone video, running kaizen events in MURAL and Zoom, mapping processes collaboratively in PowerPoint, running tiered huddles via Teams — all produces improvement work that has to live somewhere. The improvements identified in a virtual kaizen need an owner, a timeline, and a tracking mechanism. The huddle items escalated up the tiers need to be visible to the leaders they escalate to. The recognition of frontline contributions needs a platform where it can be visible to the rest of the organization. The improvement portfolio the CI champions review biweekly needs to exist as a shared portfolio rather than as scattered spreadsheets.
The visibility of who's engaged, who's contributing, and who's gone quiet that Tyler emphasized is itself a virtual-period capability. In an in-person environment, the leader can see who's at the huddle, who's submitting ideas at the board, who's coming to the kaizen events. In a virtual environment, those signals are invisible without infrastructure that surfaces them. The platform's reporting on engagement isn't a nice-to-have. It's the substitute for the in-person observation that used to provide the signal.
None of this changes what the panelists were doing. The virtual kaizen techniques are the techniques. The mapping methods are the methods. The coaching practices are the practices. What infrastructure does is preserve the integrity of the practice when the practice is being applied at scale across many sites, many teams, and the kinds of time horizons that real improvement work operates over.
What platforms are the panelists using for virtual improvement work? Chris and Tyler both work primarily in Microsoft Teams, which supports video conferencing, persistent chat, file sharing, and integration with the broader Microsoft suite (Visio for mapping, PowerPoint for collaborative documents, Planner for tasks, Power BI for analytics). Tyler also uses Lucidchart for some sharing work. Mohamed uses Zoom for video conferencing (primarily for the breakout room feature), MURAL for collaborative whiteboarding, Asana for task tracking, and Google Drive for file sharing. The honest assessment: any of the major platforms can support the work. The choice is usually driven by what the organization already has in place.
How do you go to gemba virtually? Tyler's approach at AcenTek: field technicians download the video conferencing app on their smartphones and join the team meeting from the customer site. The technician walks the team through what they're seeing on video. The office team can observe the actual work environment without anyone driving there. Works for substantial troubleshooting that would otherwise require multiple trips. Not appropriate for small issues — the overhead isn't worth it. Requires good headphones for the technician and adequate cellular or Wi-Fi service. Check with legal and compliance before recording or sharing customer site footage.
Can you actually run a five-day kaizen event virtually? Yes, with substantial adaptations. Mohamed had just run one two weeks before the webinar. The key lessons: sponsorship commitment matters more; pre-event data validation matters more; stakeholder dynamics are harder to read in advance; team size should max around 12 (vs. 16 in-person); technology orientation training before the event is essential; create extra Zoom breakout rooms upfront because you can't easily add them later; breakout groups of three to four work best; you need just as many facilitators as in-person, not fewer; the 30-day post-event review becomes substantively more work because physical follow-up that couldn't happen during the virtual event has to happen then.
How do you decide what should be done virtually versus in person within a kaizen event? Mohamed's framing borrows from quick changeover (SMED). Distinguish between internal work (must be done with physical presence at the site, like setup tasks that require the machine stopped) and external work (can be done remotely, like preparation that doesn't require the machine). Everything that can be done virtually goes into the virtual portion of the event. Everything that requires physical presence is deferred to a post-event physical phase. Mohamed sees this hybrid format as a permanent improvement in kaizen practice, not just a COVID adaptation — even in normal conditions, three days virtual plus two days on-site saves substantial travel cost while preserving the work that genuinely requires physical presence.
How long should a virtual kaizen day be? Chris's experience: about two hours is the maximum for a single continuous virtual session. Run multiple two-hour blocks across the day with substantial breaks between them rather than full continuous days. Set expectations explicitly — "we're going to go for two hours" — to help participants stay engaged. Give participants permission to step away when something at home requires their attention. Mohamed's similar observation: the focused engagement of a virtual session is more intense per minute than in-person, but it doesn't scale to a full eight-hour day.
What's the best tool for virtual process mapping? There isn't a single best tool — there's the tool the organization already has that supports real-time collaborative editing. Tyler uses PowerPoint within Office 365 because everyone at AcenTek has it. Drop shape templates on the left side of the screen; have all participants open the file simultaneously and edit collaboratively. Mohamed uses MURAL because it has the snap features and icon libraries of Visio plus multi-participant simultaneous editing. Google Slides, Keynote, and Lucidchart all work. The platform doesn't matter as much as the practice of having everyone edit simultaneously rather than having one facilitator move shapes while everyone else watches.
What's the most common mistake in virtual mapping? Adding connectors (the lines between shapes) before the shapes are in their final positions. The connectors attach to shapes in ways that produce substantial rework when shapes subsequently move. Both Tyler and Mohamed flagged this. The workflow that works: get all shapes placed first, then add connectors as a finishing step. MURAL has an auto-connect feature that completes the connectors automatically once shapes are positioned — useful if the team is using MURAL specifically.
How do tiered huddles work in a virtual environment? Wright Medical kept the tier 1 and tier 2 huddles (closest to the product) in person because the work being huddled about happens in person. The tier 3 and tier 4 huddles (management and senior leadership) moved to virtual format to protect the health of people closest to production. Two lessons emerged: the quality of the meeting is the quality of the people, not the structure (the format carries less weight when the room isn't reinforcing it); and senior leaders who can't be physically present have to learn to ask better questions, since the casual observation of in-person huddles doesn't translate to virtual.
What's different about virtual coaching? Mohamed's central observation: empathy has to come first, and the problem has to come second. The coachee is already operating outside their comfort zone simply by being virtual. Reading body language is harder. Pushing them further out of comfort is counterproductive if they're not in a state to receive the push. The coach's job during crisis is to keep the person motivated to take small steps, not to maximize immediate problem-solving output. Some coaching calls during the early COVID months were entirely about how the person and their family were doing. That was the appropriate use of the time.
How do you handle virtual training and book clubs? Chris described Wright Medical's organic book club culture — small groups of seven or eight people reading the same book at the same time with a facilitator and weekly chapter discussions. Books included "Multipliers" by Liz Wiseman, "Drive" by Daniel Pink, "The Making of a Manager," and "Out of the Crisis" by Deming. Tyler described AcenTek's broader approach to training: rethinking training material to support different learning styles, recording presentations as videos for on-demand visual learning, extracting the audio as podcast-style content for people who want to listen while walking or doing other things, and adapting hands-on activities (like the "draw a pig" exercise for standard work) for virtual breakout rooms.
How do you handle virtual conferences? Mohamed's lessons from running an early virtual conference for the M+ Group: hire a moderator who knows the platform deeply; have a dedicated question-fielder separate from the moderator; build networking time into the schedule explicitly between sessions (cut session length to make room); pivot the content to what the audience actually needs in the moment rather than what was planned pre-event. Attendees specifically called out the deliberately-designed networking time as one of the highest-value parts of the conference.
How do you keep the sense of community going in virtual work? Multiple panelists touched on this. Chris emphasized buzzing colleagues for quick video chats rather than sending email when something comes up — the video maintains the sense of community in a way email doesn't. Internal challenges at Wright Medical included reaching out to two people you interact with but don't usually connect with daily, just to check in on how they're doing. Mark added that the KaiNexus team has standing regular check-ins (three times per week), a Friday virtual happy hour, and virtual huddles that balance work focus with deliberate social connection. The conscious investment in non-work connection matters more in virtual environments because the casual office connection isn't happening on its own.
What about VR or smart glasses? Mohamed had been looking into virtual reality tools and found that the technology hadn't advanced at the pace he'd expected during the early COVID months. The most advanced VR tools he found were for presentation training — simulating that you're presenting to a virtual audience — which didn't add operational value over actually presenting to real people via video. Smart glasses came up in the audience questions, and Chris's answer was "if they make you smarter, I'll buy a pair, but I can't get there." Specific tools like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist and Bcast for brainstorming surfaced as audience questions but none of the panelists had used them.
How do you do virtual 5S when home is the workplace? Tyler's approach: same principles, applied to the new context. Sort through what you need; remove what you don't. Organize what remains. Clean the work area, including sanitization in COVID times. Standardize. Sustain. The substantive shift Tyler described is applying 5S to file structures — taking advantage of remote work to clean up the file systems that had become unwieldy over years. Teams have been using video conferencing to share before/after photos of workspace improvements, which preserves the visible recognition and learning that physical 5S boards used to provide.
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