KaiNexus CEO and co-founder Greg Jacobson joins host Mark Graban for the twenty-ninth episode of the Ask Us Anything series, the recurring session built around questions from webinar attendees. The questions in this batch circle a theme the hosts know well: improvement work, like any habit, decays without deliberate maintenance. One reader asks how to sustain improvement. Another asks how to build Lean systems on a foundation of culture. And because the episode was recorded during a stretch of mostly virtual work, several questions turn to the practical mechanics of meetings, how many to hold, how to run them, and how to keep them human on a screen. Running through all of it is the recognition that entropy is the natural state, and leadership attention is the energy that holds a system in place.
Here is what the episode covers and the thinking behind each answer.
A reader named Madeline asked about strategies to sustain improvement. Mark's first answer was that the most effective strategy is engaging people in the improvement process from the start. Far too often, the conversation about sustaining change or gaining buy-in happens way too late, after a change has effectively been forced on people, at which point you're trying to bolt sustainment onto something nobody helped create. People tend to sustain what they helped build. Engage them early and the sustainment problem shrinks.
Greg approached it from two angles. First, have you put the pieces in place to create an organizational habit, the cue, the routine, the benefit? Have you built the kind of behavioral architecture that sets people up for success? Second, and this is the failure mode he sees most, leaders announce that improvement matters, make a big deal of it once, and then never mention it again, assuming that one Monday speech will sustain in perpetuity. All systems have entropy, and all systems regress toward prior habits. It is the job of leadership to keep beating the drum, to make improvement a visible, ongoing part of people's responsibility and the culture, by doing visible things at the local level that show it's important.
Mark added a point about agreement that's easy to skip. Don't just work to gain alignment around the improvement, the solution, the countermeasure. Work to gain alignment around whether there's a problem in the first place. If people don't agree there's a gap worth addressing, why would they adopt something new? You have to talk about the problem, not just the improvement.
That led to a candid exchange. KaiNexus had recently shifted internally from Google Chat to Slack, and the people who saw a problem with the old way moved easily, while the people who were comfortable didn't see a problem at all. Greg named the two situations: sometimes people don't realize there's a better way, and sometimes they're hitting their head against a wall without recognizing it. Mark admitted, not proudly, that when he got the invitation to join the new tool, his first thought was "we tried that five years ago and it didn't work." He laughed at himself, because that's exactly the reaction CI practitioners hear when they try to initiate change, and he didn't like hearing it in his own head.
The Slack story turned into a small case study in how to lead change well. Greg didn't force it. The idea bubbled up from someone on the team, and it was run as an experiment, "let's try it, let's see what people think." It evolved organically, a lot of people liked the new way, and a path forward emerged. Both hosts dwelled on the "we tried that before and it didn't work" reflex, because it has two very different tones. One is dismissive, why would we try that again. The other is fact-based and useful: we tried it, it didn't stick, what's different now? In this case, the team was three times larger than the last attempt, which changed the circumstances. Unpacking why a past attempt failed, rather than using the failure to shut down the conversation, is the productive move.
A reader named Peter asked how to build Lean systems on a culture foundation. Mark pointed to the illustration Toyota people use, including Jamie Bonini from TSSC, which he was allowed to adapt in his book "Lean Hospitals." Culture is the foundation of the Toyota Production System, with technical methods and managerial practices built on top as an integrated system. Bonini frames philosophy as the foundation for all of it; the Shingo Institute uses the language of principles. Whatever word you use, philosophy, mindset, principles, beliefs, there's value in exploring them before moving forward with Lean practices. KaiNexus has its own articulation of beliefs. The bigger risk is moving straight to tools without thinking about the principles underneath, though Mark acknowledged the opposite risk too: if Lean becomes nothing but a talking exercise about philosophy, that doesn't move anyone forward either.
Greg pushed on the tension directly. Culture is a manifestation of action. He reached for the quote he always slightly misremembers, which Mark corrected: am I going to think my way to a new way of acting, or act my way to a new way of thinking? The honest answer is a balance of both. One extreme is sitting around discussing philosophy all day and getting nothing done. The other is grabbing a few tools and applying them without being thoughtful about why. The realistic path is non-linear: you behave a certain way, problem-solving behaviors, customer-centered behaviors, and that behavior is the culture, the same way a basketball player doesn't perfect the free throw before starting on dribbling. You develop all of it in balance, with the right mentality. Greg connected it back to KaiNexus's own experience. The company finally wrote down its values and traits, something it could not have done back in 2014 when it became more than a two-person company, because it didn't yet know who it was or what it valued. You have to do some behaving to discover who you are, and then you can define the things that will influence who you become.
Asked what's most challenging about being CEO of KaiNexus, Greg named the tension between not knowing what you're doing and having to project that you do, between going from the gut and reading about what should be done. He finds that the most challenging and the most intellectually compelling part of the job. He doesn't think he has a problem listening to everyone's ideas, even if he gets a little grumpy before coming around to someone's point. He also noted how much his role has changed, from doing a lot when KaiNexus was a five-person company to influencing, advising, and interpreting data now, a shift you never quite recognize exactly on time. Mark added that he appreciates leaders who don't feel they always have to have the answer or get their way because they're the boss, and that running experiments and figuring it out beats insisting you already know the answer.
A reader asked for one thing that would improve virtual meetings. The hosts started with general meeting hygiene, an agenda and an expected outcome stated in advance, cultural reminders that make people feel safe to speak up and challenge the status quo to avoid groupthink, before getting to the virtual-specific tactics.
Greg feels strongly about cameras on. When everyone is in an office, you can't turn your presence off; you're there. Beyond that, from years of teaching and faculty work, he finds nothing more demoralizing than talking to black boxes with no idea how people are reacting. The non-verbal cues, smiling, nodding, showing attention, matter enormously to the person speaking, since most communication is non-verbal. He acknowledged not everyone is fully on board, but appreciated how well the team had been doing it.
He offered two tactics worth stealing. Turn off self-view. Constantly looking at yourself is stressful and time-consuming, and it's a difference from in-person meetings, where there's no mirror across the table. In Zoom you can hide self-view from the ellipsis menu, and your stress level drops. And shrink the other person's window rather than viewing them full-screen, where their head is literally larger than life and a little jarring, and position their face as close to your camera as possible to approximate eye contact. Mark uses the same trick, moving the other person's eyes as close to the camera as he can to create the appearance of eye contact. Both noted that genuine eye contact remains an unsolved problem, looking into the camera means you can't see reactions except in peripheral vision, and the various hardware and software fixes solve some problems while creating others.
Morgan from the KaiNexus team asked how to gauge the proper quantity of meetings against the benefit of work time and less context switching. Greg's honest answer was that it differs for different people, depending on the work they do. He pointed to a blog post Adam Hamed, the chief architect, circulates, "Makers vs. Managers," about how context switching affects different kinds of work. His hope, perhaps unrealistic, is that if people are in a recurring meeting they're getting no value from, they'd raise it, find alternate ways to communicate the information, or simply drop off for higher-priority work.
Mark added cycles of reflection on the value of a meeting versus its cost. What's the purpose, updates and communication, or debate, discussion, and decision-making? He flagged a warning sign: when people start calling something "the nine o'clock meeting," it may have lost its sense of purpose and become a ritual. Better to name it for what it does, a daily huddle, and even then ask what you're huddling for. Good questions to evaluate: should this meeting be an email? Am I a spectator or a contributor?
Several practical tactics surfaced. KaiNexus records some meetings so people who can't attend can listen later, Greg at 1.5x or 2x speed, to get the flavor. The Friday all-hands meeting is documented in notes that take a couple of minutes to review and capture what people are up to. Mark reviews those notes even after attending, because attention is finite and he always catches something he missed.
Both hosts made a point of defending the unproductive-looking parts of meetings. The first fifteen minutes of a dev meeting that day produced nothing tactical, just people ripping and joking around, and Greg considered it valuable because we're social creatures. The Friday all-hands deliberately doesn't jump into the agenda one minute in; the loose discussion at the start builds camaraderie that matters, especially in virtual times. And the meeting includes a gratitude practice, where the silence after someone shares, five or ten seconds that feels awkward to a kinetic person like Greg, is exactly the space that lets the next person formulate a thought and speak up. Mark works with another group that consciously leaves up to a ten-second count after a question, because some people process before they speak, and ten seconds of "wasted" time is a small price for making it more likely someone contributes rather than missing their window.
A live question asked how to stay motivated as a continuous improvement manager. Greg's answer was about conviction. He feels to the bottom of his heart how much continuous improvement matters to people and to organizations, and the antidote to discouragement is constantly reminding yourself that the work matters, even on the days, weeks, or months when it isn't landing or people don't yet see the vision.
Mark added the structural condition that protects motivation. Ideally the drive for continuous improvement comes from the CEO and top executives. There's a real role for CI managers and specialists, but the creation, nurturing, and growth of an improvement culture cannot be delegated the way tasks, training, and coaching can. When the organization puts a CI professional in a position where the work isn't connected to core strategy and results, that person gets worn down. You can delegate the work. You can't delegate the passion.
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, and occasional guest hosts from the KaiNexus team.
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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