KaiNexus CEO and co-founder Greg Jacobson joins host Mark Graban for the twentieth episode of the Ask Us Anything series, the recurring session built around questions from webinar attendees. The questions in this batch share a quiet through-line: continuous improvement is a living thing, not a switch. It can be revived after a stall, but you cannot revive it without understanding why it stalled. It can be made more popular, but only if the people doing the work get something out of it themselves. And training alone, even green belts and black belts, does not produce improvement if the people who hold the certifications are not doing improvement work.
Here is what the episode covers and the thinking behind each answer.
An attendee named Tuan asked how to restart a culture that has slid backwards, with no continuous improvement activity in six months. Greg's two-pronged answer landed in the right place. Start in roughly the same way you started the first time. But before you do, do some root cause work on why it slid in the first place, because rerunning the launch playbook against a problem you have not diagnosed will produce the same drift again.
Mark expanded the diagnostic. Did leaders stop going out and asking for ideas? Did people stop seeing progress on the improvements they submitted? Did someone make an offhand comment about big ROI projects that quietly devalued the small daily work? Was time for improvement quietly squeezed out by other priorities? Each of those is a different repair, and rebuilding from the same starting point without checking which one happened wastes the second chance.
Greg added a pattern KaiNexus sees often enough to predict. When a customer's CI activity drops, the cause traces to a leadership change about as often as anything else. The same pattern shows up after acquisitions, and especially in healthcare. When people are uncertain whether their organization will be around tomorrow, or whether their job will, they cannot do the kind of work that requires trust. Continuous improvement needs a stable enough foundation underneath it to be worth investing in. That is not always something the CI team can manufacture on its own, but it is something worth naming when you are trying to understand why momentum has stopped.
An attendee named William wrote in with a related question. He had been charged with revitalizing the CI process and making it more popular. Mark went to the question of "what's in it for me." Asking people to do continuous improvement only for the organization's benefit produces compliance at best. Asking them how to make their own work easier, less frustrating, more enjoyable produces real engagement, and the organizational benefits follow on their own. It is not selfish for people to want to make their own work better. It is the cleanest entry point.
Greg played with the word "popular." A program that feels heavy, serious, jargon-laden, and obligatory will not become popular by being pushed harder. He floated the word "joy," then qualified it, the better word might be something lighter. A bit of flippancy. A sense that this is the time of the workday when you can unplug from the production work and think about how to make the work better. The word "joy" came back through Mark, who pointed to Richard Sheridan's "Joy Inc." about Menlo Innovations in Ann Arbor, to Joe Swartz at Franciscan St. Francis where the Catholic mission centers on joyful service, and to W. Edwards Deming's older language about joy in work. Pascal Dennis, who worked at Toyota in Ontario, uses "playfulness" for the same idea: serious work, but with enough lightness to keep creativity alive. The point either way is the same. Programs that feel like grim duty fade. Programs that feel like good work people want to be part of grow.
Greg added the leadership behavior underneath this. Beating the drum on continuous improvement is necessary, but the strongest version is leaders doing the work themselves and saying so. "Here is what I am doing this month to make my work easier" is a more credible drumbeat than "everyone needs to participate." Doing and showing creates pull. Asking creates push.
An attendee named Melody asked how to print accomplishments out of KaiNexus. Greg's literal answer was that the team rarely prints anything; the Austin office runs through about one ream of paper every four years. But he caught the spirit of the question and went there instead. The point of "printing accomplishments" is usually recognition, and recognition matters more than people think. He shared a small example. His wife is an experienced emergency physician, not somebody he would describe as someone who needs much affirmation. She got a brief email from her medical director the day before, just acknowledging she had handled a busy shift well. She said it was nice to be appreciated. Recognition lands even on people you would not predict it would land on.
Mark added the spread case for printing. Putting a printed improvement up on a huddle board can be useful locally, both for recognition and for sharing ideas inside a department. The case for a system like KaiNexus is exactly the case paper cannot make: spreading what one site or department learned to the other parts of the organization that would benefit. Paper works inside one team. Software works across a system.
A meta question came up about whether KaiNexus still considers itself a startup. Greg used the question to think out loud about what "startup" actually means. Three filters: how long you have been around, whether you are solving a problem that has been solved before, and what your finances look like. A new plumbing business is none of those, even though it is genuinely a new business doing hard work. Greg's framing was that "startup" is more a mindset than a status, and he hopes KaiNexus keeps the mindset indefinitely. There is at least a component of startup in what they do.
Mark pulled up Eric Ries's definition: a startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty. He pointed at the obvious arc. Early on the uncertainty was whether anyone would buy this at all. Later it was whether anyone outside healthcare would. Year over year the uncertainty has come down. Greg agreed and added a useful nuance: even inside a small company, different functions might sit at different points on that spectrum. Operations should not be running like a startup, because you want bread-and-butter security and accounting practices, not experimentation. The product side is where the experimentation belongs.
An attendee named Zoltan asked whether Lean can be sustained when shop floor turnover is consistently 25 to 35 percent, and there is no short- or mid-term prospect of reducing it. Mark went at the obvious thing first. If turnover is that high, that is a serious problem worth treating as an A3 in its own right. What are the root causes? What countermeasures could be tested? Reducing turnover would be a meaningful Lean outcome. He also offered the hopeful hypothesis: engaging people in continuous improvement tends to reduce frustration and increase satisfaction, which makes people more likely to stay. So the relationship can run both ways. The improvement work itself can be part of the turnover fix.
Greg drew out a useful distinction. There is structural turnover, where the business model effectively requires people to cycle through, and there is dysfunctional turnover, where good people leave because the workplace is bad. A summer camp that scales from 54 year-round staff up to a thousand counselors during the summer has structural turnover; the counselors are college students, and the role is temporary by design. A staffing firm whose workforce is mostly people between jobs has the same shape. In those cases the improvement culture has to absorb a different reality, and the training new people get on "how we do things here" has to be short, sharp, and front-loaded enough to give the program something to work with. Where turnover is dysfunctional, though, the cultural project and the turnover problem are the same problem.
The last substantive question came from someone asking how to keep everyone active when there is a population of trained green belts and black belts but no real improvement work has followed.
Greg's answer pointed at a common misconception: that training itself produces practice. It does not. Training someone in green belt or black belt methods and then expecting them to apply that training back in their work is the same kind of disconnect as expecting an employee to read a memo about a new behavior and start doing it. The habit loop requires the action and the reward to be close enough together that the brain registers the connection. Big projects that take a year or two to finish often complete after the conditions that made them relevant have changed, and the people who did the work never feel the loop close.
His recommendation reverses the usual order. At the start of a CI journey, less training is better, not more. Get people doing small, low-cost, low-risk improvements first, so the habit forms. Then, once people are already operating with that mindset, layer on green belt or black belt training. They will absorb it differently because they are already doing the work. The training accelerates a practice that already exists, rather than substituting for one.
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.
See KaiNexus in action and see how KaiNexus helps organizations capture ideas, coach improvement, and connect daily work to strategy.
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