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Most organizations don't have a CI tools problem. They have a CI culture problem.
Lean. Six Sigma. Kaizen. PDSA. The methodologies work when they're applied well. They produce real results in real organizations. And yet the most common pattern Scott Bergmeyer sees, across thirty-plus years working in manufacturing, healthcare, technology, and education, is the same one continuous improvement leaders have been describing for decades: tools deployed, projects completed, momentum building -- and then somewhere between eighteen months and three years in, the program stalls. The binders are still on the shelf. The huddle boards are still on the wall. The behavior has reverted.
This session is Scott's answer to why that happens and what to do about it. He walks through six concrete steps that build a culture of improvement that actually lasts, organized around a framework he's developed working directly with executives and CI leaders. It's not a methodology lecture. It's a leadership framework for the work that has to happen around the methodology for any of it to stick.
Scott Bergmeyer is the Executive Director of the Iowa Quality Center (IQC), where he leads training, consulting, and Iowa's Baldrige Performance Excellence program. He's a Master Black Belt, the creator of The DMAIC Way®, and the author of multiple books and articles on improvement. His tagline: Make it better. Make it stick.
Scott opens with a provocation. Executives often ask whether culture change is possible. His answer is yes, and he can do it for them tomorrow. They're always interested -- until he explains the two options.
The fast path is revolution: fire everyone in the company and hire only people who fit the culture you want. Same culture, new staff. Done in a day. Nobody ever wants to do that.
The slow path is evolution. It takes time, effort, and consistent leadership behavior. There is no shortcut.
The point is sharper than it sounds. When leaders say they want to "change the culture," they usually want the result without the work. Recognizing that evolution is the only realistic option clarifies what the work actually looks like -- and how long it takes. The size of your organization, the complexity of your operating model, and how change-ready your people are will all affect the timeline. But there is no magic. There is only consistent attention and consistent leadership behavior over time.
The first step is the one most organizations skip, often without realizing it.
Most CI rollouts start with the methodology -- we're going to do Lean, we're going to do Six Sigma -- and never specify what improvement actually means for this organization. What will be different? How will leaders behave that they don't behave today? How will people on the floor act differently? What will the business see -- reduced costs, better customer experience, faster cycle times, higher engagement?
Scott uses the analogy of building a bridge. You're going from one side of a river to the other. The vision is the picture of the other side -- specific enough that everyone can see it. The planks of the bridge are the steps that get you there. Without the picture, the planks have nowhere to go.
He also makes a point that resonates with executives: CI leaders have to speak the language of business. Yes, the work makes things easier. Yes, customers are more satisfied. Yes, engagement improves. None of that lands with the CFO or the board if it isn't connected to business results in language they can use. The vision has to translate.
Search "continuous improvement framework" online and you'll find millions of variations. Lean, Six Sigma, Lean Sigma, DMAIC, PDSA, PDCA, Kata, A3, plus dozens of branded methodologies. Scott has seen one called "Extreme Sigma," which he can only picture as Six Sigma practitioners jumping out of airplanes.
His recommendation is direct: pick one. Make it visual. Use plain language. Build it around a clear cycle of steps. And then commonize on it across the organization.
The failure mode he sees most often isn't picking the wrong framework. It's picking too many. He worked with a health system that had fourteen different improvement frameworks across the organization. Frontline staff didn't know which one to use today. The result was framework fatigue -- people who experienced "improvement" as something being done to them, not with them. The framework became the obstacle to the work.
Which framework? Scott prefers Lean Sigma, but he's not dogmatic about it. Lay any of these side by side and the thinking process is fundamentally the same: understand the current state, find the root cause, test changes, sustain the gains. Pick one, use it, refine it. If you learn something that requires changing the framework, change it -- but change it deliberately and communicate the change.
This is the step Scott's audiences most often vote as their biggest opportunity, and it's the one most CI training programs ignore.
Research suggests that around 90-95% of people consider themselves self-aware. The actual number is closer to 5-10%. The gap matters because leaders without self-awareness don't see the gap between how they intend to come across and how they actually do.
Scott uses a self-assessment exercise during the session that lands the point. Pick a word from a list of strengths -- persuasive, vigilant, confident, decisive. Then look at the same numbered position on a second list, which shows how that strength can be experienced by others under stress: persuasive becomes manipulative, vigilant becomes nosy, confident becomes arrogant, decisive becomes domineering. Same person. Same behavior. Different reception.
For CI leaders, the implication is direct. You may think you're persuading people to adopt better methods. They may experience you as manipulating them into yet another flavor-of-the-month initiative. You may think you're being thorough. They may experience you as nosy and intrusive. Self-awareness is what lets you see the gap and adjust your approach so that people experience your intent rather than your impact.
The deeper point: building a culture of improvement requires connecting with individuals. Connection requires meeting people where they are. Meeting people where they are requires understanding how you come across to them.
Once the framework is in place, the question becomes how it actually gets rolled out -- and this is where most programs fail.
Executives often tell Scott some version of "we've tried that before and it didn't quite work." When he probes, what usually went wrong is that improvement was treated as a thing -- a program, an initiative, an event, a compliance requirement -- rather than as how the work gets done. As long as it's extra, it dies. The minute attention shifts, people return to what they were doing before.
His preferred approach: model, coach, reflect. Have a clear model for how improvement works in your organization. Coach to that model consistently. Then reflect honestly on what's working and what isn't -- including how you're coaching, not just what people are doing.
The coaching point is one Scott has had to learn the hard way. He's coached around 3,000 yellow belts, green belts, and black belts over his career. Different people need different coaching. Asking probing questions energizes some people and frustrates others. Walking through examples on a whiteboard works for some and bores others. A coach who applies the same approach to everyone connects with maybe a third of their people and loses the rest.
He's also explicit about something most CI leaders won't say out loud: he doesn't really care if people fill out the A3 template. What he cares about is whether they're using the thinking. If someone hits a problem and walks through the right thinking -- defining it clearly, finding the root cause, testing a change, learning from the result -- that's the win. The documentation matters for organizational learning and visibility. The behavior matters for the culture.
This step is more counterintuitive than it sounds.
Most CI programs default to selling. They put up posters about a successful 5S event, write blog posts about a kaizen, share before-and-after photos of an improved process, and assume that demonstrating value will produce buy-in. It doesn't. Selling is tactical. Selling is convincing a specific person to participate in a specific project. Marketing is something else.
Marketing is the strategic positioning work that creates the conditions under which selling becomes possible. It's how people come to understand what improvement means in this organization, why it matters, what it looks like, and who they want to be in relation to it. It's brand, narrative, persona, and the social proof that lets people see themselves in the program before they're asked to join it.
Scott references Malcolm Gladwell's tipping point work. Newer research suggests the threshold is closer to 20-30% of an organization actively engaged before the culture starts to shift on its own. Below that threshold, you're recruiting one person at a time, and progress feels slow. Above it, the momentum becomes self-reinforcing. Marketing is what gets you to the threshold.
Most CI programs spend almost all their energy on selling -- direct recruitment of individuals into projects -- and almost none on the marketing work that makes the selling easier. The result is years of effort with disappointing engagement numbers.
The final step is the one that's hardest to argue with and hardest to actually do: get things done.
CI leaders are particularly prone to a specific failure mode here. They start a project, scope expands, the team realizes there are more variables than expected, and the project grows. Six months later, nothing has finished. Leaders conclude that the program doesn't work. Skepticism returns.
Scott's prescription is progress over perfection. Pick small things. Finish them. Reflect on what happened. Move to the next thing. Build a track record of completed improvements that people can see, rather than one heroic project that may or may not deliver.
He also makes a counterintuitive point about scope. If your improvement plan has six action items and four of them produce the result you wanted, you don't necessarily need the other two. The other two might be administrative overhead that bogs the team down without adding value. CI leaders are often perfectionists who want to dot every i. Sometimes the right move is to call it done, move on, and apply the team's attention somewhere it can produce another result.
Execution is where credibility gets built. Credibility is what makes the next round of selling easier. Easier selling builds the momentum that gets you toward the tipping point. The flywheel matters.
Scott was direct about the specific failure patterns he sees most often. A few worth naming explicitly.
Treating CI as a program rather than a way of working. "We're doing a Lean program" sets the expectation that there's a start and an end. Programs end. The behavior reverts. CI has to be how the work gets done, not a thing layered on top of the work.
Mandating tools without explaining purpose. Scott described being asked how to handle organizations that require specific tools -- A3 for everything, regardless of context. His approach: ask leaders to explain the purpose of the mandate, then ask whether the results justify the rigidity. If they do, fine. If they don't, you have an opening for a different conversation. Mandates without purpose produce compliance, not commitment.
Confusing credit with improvement. He gets asked how to manage a culture where people fight over credit for improvements. His answer cuts to the bone: if the conversation is about credit, the culture is about credit, not improvement. The real question is whether the organization is moving toward "we got better together" or "I get the points." The vision and the leadership behavior around it determine which one wins.
Coming in as a hero. He fielded a question about getting buy-in from long-tenured employees who have seen every flavor of the month. His method: ask if they agree things could be better. Get them to name specifics. Then work side-by-side with them on the small things they identified, prove the thinking works by delivering quick wins, and let the results do the persuading. The story he told was a fifty-dollar electrical part that solved a five-year frustration on a production line -- a result the team experienced as someone finally taking their problem seriously.
Scott's framework is leadership work, not software work. But several of the six steps benefit from infrastructure that makes the work visible and sustainable.
KaiNexus addresses two of the failure modes Scott named directly. The framework-fatigue problem -- fourteen different improvement methodologies across one organization -- gets reduced when the work lives in a single shared system, with a consistent structure for capturing, tracking, and reporting improvements regardless of which methodology produced them. And the execution problem -- projects that start and never finish, ideas that disappear into a queue with no owner -- gets addressed when every improvement has a tracked status, an owner, and a clear path through to completion.
The marketing-versus-selling distinction also connects. KaiNexus makes successful improvements visible across the organization. People in one department can see what people in another are doing and how it's going. That's the social proof that marketing work depends on -- and it's hard to build without a shared system, particularly across multi-site or multi-business-unit organizations.
Scott Bergmeyer is the Executive Director of the Iowa Quality Center (IQC), where he leads training, consulting, and the state of Iowa's Baldrige Performance Excellence program. He has worked and consulted in manufacturing, technology, education, and healthcare for over thirty years, holding roles including QA Manager, CI Manager, Organizational Development leader, SVP of Quality and Improvement, and Chief Improvement Officer. He is a Master Black Belt and the creator of The DMAIC Way®, the framework behind his belt certification programs at the white, yellow, green, and black belt levels. His goal: make it better, make it stick.
What are the six steps to creating a culture of improvement?
Vision, framework, self-awareness, how (not what), marketing (not selling), and execution. Each step builds on the ones before it. A clear vision tells people where you're going. A single, simple framework gives them a shared way to get there. Self-awareness lets leaders see how their behavior is actually received. Focusing on how (the coaching, the model, the daily practice) rather than what (the tools, the events, the projects) makes improvement part of the work instead of an addition to it. Marketing builds the conditions in which selling improvement becomes possible. Execution -- visible, repeated, focused on progress over perfection -- builds the credibility that sustains everything else.
Why can't culture change happen overnight?
The fast path is revolution -- replace your whole workforce with people who already fit the culture you want -- and no organization ever chooses that. The other path is evolution: consistent leadership behavior over time, applied across many decisions and interactions. There is no shortcut. The size and complexity of your organization, plus how change-ready your people are, will affect how long it takes. But the work is always the same: model the behavior you want, build the systems that support it, coach the people doing it, and stay consistent long enough for it to become how things get done.
Why is self-awareness so important for CI leaders?
Research suggests around 90-95% of people believe they're self-aware, while the actual figure is closer to 5-10%. The gap matters because leaders without self-awareness don't see how their behavior is received by others. A leader who believes they're being persuasive may be experienced as manipulative. A leader who believes they're being thorough may be experienced as intrusive. Same behavior, different reception. Building a culture of improvement requires connecting with individuals. That requires understanding how you come across so you can adjust your approach to actually reach the person in front of you.
What's the difference between marketing improvement and selling it?
Selling is the tactical work of convincing a specific person to participate in a specific improvement project. Marketing is the strategic work of positioning, branding, and narrative that creates the conditions under which selling becomes possible. Most CI programs over-invest in selling and under-invest in marketing. The result is years of recruiting one person at a time and never reaching the threshold where the culture starts to shift on its own. Research suggests that threshold is closer to 20-30% of an organization actively engaged. Marketing is what gets you there.
How do you handle long-tenured employees who have seen every flavor of the month?
Ask if they agree things could be better. Almost everyone does. Ask them to name specifics -- what's frustrating, what's broken, what should be easier. Then work side-by-side with them on the small things they identified, prove the thinking works by delivering quick wins, and let the results do the persuading. The point isn't to argue them into believing. It's to demonstrate the method by using it on something that matters to them. Scott described solving a five-year production-line frustration with a fifty-dollar electrical part. The fix was small. The signal -- that someone finally took the problem seriously -- was what changed the conversation.
How do you sustain improvements once they're implemented?
Sustainment is a different set of actions from improvement, and most organizations conflate them. Make-it-better is about implementing change. Make-it-stick is about the follow-up, feedback, and visible reinforcement that keeps the change in place after the team's attention shifts to the next thing. That means standard work that reflects the new process, monitoring that surfaces drift quickly, and leadership behavior that keeps the improvement visible in daily routines. Sustainment without a deliberate plan is wishful thinking.
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