Harry Kenworthy spent 26 years at Rogers Corporation, a global manufacturer, ending as a corporate VP of Manufacturing. He spent nine years on the board of a Japanese joint venture that was a key supplier to Toyota and learned about Lean directly from the source. He worked alongside Dr. W. Edwards Deming in 1983–85 on a series of two-day seminars sponsored by MIT, attending four or five sessions a year for three years. He had working relationships with Dr. Joseph Juran and Dorian Shainin. He was a Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award examiner from 1989–1991.
In the mid-1990s, Harry became one of the first practitioners to apply Lean in the public sector. The work started pro bono with a couple of government organizations in 2004–2005 and accelerated after the 2008–2009 financial crisis. By the time of this webinar, QPIC's client base was roughly 97–98 percent government — cities, counties, state agencies, federal agencies, K-12 school systems.
That client mix matters because public-sector work strips away the parts of Lean implementation that private-sector practitioners sometimes hide behind. You can't sell government with margin pressure. You can't promise stock-price impact. Workforces don't churn fast enough to swap out resistance. Statutes and ordinances constrain solutions in ways that private companies rarely face. What's left is the actual work — clarifying customer need, reducing waste, building capability, and shifting culture.
Harry called his ten principles the Ten Commandments. The session moved through them in sequence, with examples from agencies that had implemented each one. The framing is deliberately accessible. The substance underneath is what you'd expect from someone who learned from Deming, Toyota, Juran, and Shainin.
Harry Kenworthy is the Principal and Manager of the Quality and Productivity Improvement Center (QPIC, LLC), a consulting organization he founded in 1984 and has worked with full-time since 2004. He worked with Dr. W. Edwards Deming in 1983–85 on a series of two-day seminars throughout the United States, and has spoken at over 90 conferences on Quality, Productivity, Lean, and Six Sigma. He has been published in Quality Progress, Purchasing, Government Finance Review, and other publications, and had working relationships with Dr. Joseph Juran and Dorian Shainin.
Harry was one of the first practitioners to apply Lean in the government sector in the mid-1990s. His consulting work has included numerous government processes that have been improved by removing waste, reducing costs, or increasing revenues while reducing cycle times and improving customer service. He worked at Rogers Corporation, a global manufacturer, for 26 years, including his last three years as a corporate VP of Manufacturing. He provided Rogers Six Sigma training in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. He is a certified Lean Sigma Master Black Belt.
He is a founder of the Connecticut Quality Council, chaired CBIA's (Connecticut Business and Industry Association) Manufacturing Council, and was a Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award examiner from 1989–1991. He has held a CT Professional Engineer license and a Certified Quality Engineer designation. He holds a BS in Materials Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an MBA in Finance from Syracuse University.
Before walking through the commandments, Harry laid down the foundation his framework rests on.
The relentless drive is to remove waste and improve quality. Lean identifies the waste. Six Sigma addresses variation. The combination is the right approach, although Lean carries the heavier leverage in most situations. Sprinkled in are what Harry calls Shainin techniques — specialized problem-solving methods that Dorian Shainin popularized over 30 to 40 years, well worth investigating for the harder problems.
Customers come first regardless of sector. Harry referenced his friend Paul Akers' phrase: fix what bugs you. Have people identify what's actually frustrating them, and work on those processes. The "what bugs you" frame matters because it puts the improvement agenda in the hands of the people who do the work, not the consultants who walk in to assess them.
The process orientation came directly from Deming. Harry quoted Deming's maxim from those MIT seminars: a poor process will win out over good people virtually all the time. The implication is that management owns the process, the people work in the process, and blaming people rather than fixing the system is one of the deepest dysfunctions in organizations. The transition to that mindset is genuinely hard for many managers and supervisors. It's also non-negotiable for Lean to work.
What Lean does, when done well, is reduce cost and waste while increasing service and capacity. For government specifically, this matters because attrition rates of four to six percent annually are normal, and Harry mentioned one organization expecting 55 percent of its workforce to retire within five years. Public-sector organizations don't have the option of solving capacity problems by hiring more people. They have to do more with what they have, which means actually eliminating non-value-added work.
The challenge that hits almost everyone is culture. Harry's working definition: culture is the way we do things around here. Most organizations starting a Lean journey don't get beyond the tool stage. They become enamored with tools — value stream maps, 5S boards, A3 templates. Kaizen events get popular because they produce visible results and energize participants. But organizations that stop at tools don't sustain. Harry shared an example of a state agency that had been running kaizen events for eight years using an outside consultant. His reaction was direct. Within a year to year and a half — even after three coached kaizen events — an organization should be self-sufficient. Continuing to outsource the work for eight years means something has gone wrong with the implementation.
Harry quoted Toyota directly: "The most important thing for Toyota is people. Toyota is all about teaching and training people and building a culture of continuous improvement. We don't care about the next hybrid, the next engineering marvel, not even the next sales strategy. Our number one concern is how to build our people and how to build a culture of continuous improvement." Organizations that hear "Toyota" and think "they make cars, this doesn't apply to us" are missing what Toyota actually does. The cars are an output. The capability is the asset.
The first commandment is hardly a surprise, but the operational version is more demanding than the slogan version.
Harry's working test for any organization is the customer's first experience. How easy is the website to navigate? How easy is it to find the necessary forms or information? How easy is it to reach someone by phone? Most organizations haven't actually tried this themselves, and most fail it.
The standard guidance is to design materials at a seventh-grade reading level — the general average reading level in the country. Most websites and forms get built at a college level because legal staff are involved, legalese creeps in, and the complexity compounds. The customer is left navigating documents written for someone with a different educational background and a different relationship to the subject matter.
Harry's example was a motor vehicle department where instructions for commercial truck registration ran eight pages. The drivers weren't going to read eight pages. The instructions got turned around to a one-page checklist with the most important items at the top. The reject and rework rates dropped significantly. "Right the first time" — Lean's term for first-pass yield — went up significantly. The redesign wasn't about technology. It was about reading the instructions the way a customer reads them.
People respond well to checklists. They respond poorly to walls of legalese. The choice between them is a design decision.
The second commandment is about how to set targets. Harry credited the framing to Jeff Liker's True North model and the Lean Leadership Institute, where Liker — author of "The Toyota Way" and several other books — is a founding figure.
Under continuous improvement, the first pillar is challenge. And Harry's definition of challenge is specific. If a process currently takes 60 days, setting the target at 56 days is not a challenge. A real challenge means thinking in terms of at least 50 percent improvement. From 60 days, the challenge target is 30.
The pushback is predictable. People will tell you the goal is impossible, that there's no way to get there, that the assumption is unrealistic. But that reaction is exactly the point. A 50 percent improvement cannot be achieved by doing the work the way it's done today. The current thinking won't produce that kind of result. The challenge target forces the team to think differently — to use the Lean tools, to question assumptions, to redesign rather than optimize.
The next two principles Harry mentioned are his most-used words in client work. Leverage is the first. Pick the projects that have the greatest leverage — the ones where the gap is widest and the gain is largest. Use a rating grid against criteria that matter to your organization, and prioritize from there. Don't work on what's convenient. Work on what moves the needle.
Data is the second. You have to have good data to know whether leverage is real. We'll return to data in commandment eight.
The third commandment splits kaizen into its two genuine forms.
Kaizen events are the three-to-five-day full-time efforts that get most of the attention. Harry described them well. People come into a kaizen event having sat with frustrations and ideas for years, often without a venue to surface them. The event becomes that venue. Participants get actively engaged, share their ideas, take ownership, and produce meaningful results in a compressed window.
The problem starts after the event. Participants come out asking "why can't we do this all the time?" — and most organizations flip back to business as usual. The kaizen event was an exception. The culture didn't shift. The tools got used in a special window and then got shelved.
The answer is daily kaizen. Harry calls it dynamic idea generation. He referenced "Ideas Are Free" by Alan Robinson and Dean Schroeder as a useful resource. The principle is that ideas should come from employees who are actively engaged not just in surfacing the idea, but in developing and carrying it through. The classic suggestion-system pattern — an employee hands an idea to a supervisor and the idea disappears into a queue — is what makes most suggestion systems function as rejection systems. The acceptance rate Robinson and Schroeder cite for traditional suggestion systems is roughly one idea for every eight people per year. The benchmark Harry recommends targeting is one idea per employee per month implemented. The difference between those two rates is the difference between a suggestion box on a wall and a genuine improvement culture. Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle was the example Harry cited as an organization that built the more robust version.
The fourth commandment is the discipline of actually observing the process rather than discussing it from a conference room.
Inside a kaizen event, the team walks the process — every step, every touch point, every form, every screen. They identify value-added and non-value-added work. They look specifically at rework and errors, because the rework rate is almost always invisible and almost always huge. Harry mentioned error rates of 75, 80, 90 percent that have surfaced in government processes. He cited an actual example: a one-page form with a 77 percent error rate. The waste implied by that error rate — the rework, the follow-up phone calls, the time spent tracking down corrected information — is staggering.
Outside the kaizen-event context, Harry's recommendation for managers is concrete. Take a half day or a full day. Pick a key process that's currently not working well or that's keeping you up at night. Start at the very beginning and walk through it step by step with all the touch points. Ask open-ended questions. Understand the value-added and non-value-added portions. Develop a mini swim-lane map. Develop a spaghetti diagram showing the flow of work. Get copies of the forms. Take screenshots of the computer screens. Document the errors and rework you observe.
What managers see when they do this is consistently shocking. Work that should have been eliminated three years ago is still being done because the knowledge transfer between employees didn't include the elimination. People are working hard at tasks that no longer need to exist. The seeing is what surfaces this.
The fifth commandment is about flow.
Batch processing is the default in most organizations. Work accumulates in a queue at one work center, gets processed all at once, then moves to the next queue. The pattern feels efficient at the local level. At the system level, it produces idle time downstream, batch-related rework, and delays that the batching itself creates.
One-piece flow is the alternative. Work moves through the process one item at a time. Implementing it requires examining the value-added and non-value-added portions of each step, eliminating the non-value-added, and balancing the workload between steps so the system flows smoothly without bottlenecks.
Harry's ideal state is one-stop shopping — a customer interacts with one person who handles all their needs without handoffs. The DMV example he used resonates because everyone has been on the customer side of a fragmented government interaction. Achieving one-stop shopping sometimes requires job restructuring and union engagement, but the friction of those conversations is the work. Avoiding the conversation produces the customer experience everyone already complains about.
A complementary principle: when volume increases and the response is "we need to hire more people," step back first. Most of the time the value-added portion of the work is a fraction of the total. Eliminating non-value-added work and balancing the remaining workload between steps usually creates substantial capacity without adding headcount.
The sixth commandment is specific to government but the underlying principle generalizes.
Public-sector organizations operate under statutes, laws, and ordinances that constrain how work can be done. The natural assumption is that the constraints are well understood, that the organization is following them to the letter, and that improvement has to work around them.
Harry's experience contradicts that assumption. He estimates that well north of 50 percent of the time, what an organization is actually doing is not exactly what the statute or ordinance requires. Laws overlap. Statutes morph in interpretation as personnel turn over. People who built knowledge about a particular regulation leave, hand off to colleagues, and the interpretation drifts. The drift introduces waste and rework that nobody recognizes as drift.
Harry's prescription is to look at the relevant statutes first, before a kaizen event begins. Clients will sometimes tell him they're already following everything to the letter. His response is to look anyway. The findings are reliably surprising. Some of the most consequential improvements in his consulting work have come from realizing that an organization's process had drifted away from what the law actually required, and that returning to the literal text of the law eliminated work that nobody needed to be doing.
Harry's framing of legislation is worth quoting. "Legislation is really a bunch of elegant solutions that were applied to a misunderstood problems." The poorly defined problem at the front of the legislative process produces solutions that don't quite fit. The misfit becomes waste downstream. Surfacing the misfit is part of the improvement work.
The seventh commandment is to benchmark — to learn from others doing the same work elsewhere. Harry's phrasing is "steal shamelessly but legally."
In the private sector, benchmarking is hard. Competitors aren't going to share how they introduced a new product or won market share. In the public sector, it's wide open and easy. Cities, counties, school systems, agencies — all of them are working on similar processes, and most of them are willing to share what they've done. The Baldrige database alone provides examples from K-12 school systems that have won the national award.
What surprises Harry is how few public-sector organizations actually do this. They work in silos, agency by agency, department by department, without reaching out to peer organizations that have already solved the problem they're now working on. The improvement they could start from is sitting in someone else's filing cabinet, and they don't ask.
The case for benchmarking isn't just learning. It's elevating the starting plateau. If another organization has already achieved the level you're targeting, beginning improvement from that level is dramatically more efficient than re-deriving the path. Goal-setting benefits from benchmarking too — knowing what others have achieved establishes a real ceiling rather than an imagined one.
The eighth commandment was the one Harry returned to most often. It may be the most underused principle in continuous improvement work.
Most organizations don't know their error and rework rates. When Harry asks clients how the people in the process know how they're doing, the answers are often blank stares. People can't improve outcomes they can't see. They can't generate ideas about causes they can't observe. The absence of data isn't neutral. It's a constraint on engagement.
Dynamic data collection means simple systems for the people working in the process to collect and display their own data, daily, in the work area. Not IT systems. Not enterprise dashboards. Concentration diagrams. Check sheets. Tick marks in a grid. Tools simple enough that capturing data takes a second or two, and the resulting display tells the team something useful at a glance.
Harry's first example was a public-works safety display. The default approach to safety communication is an 8.5×11 spreadsheet in 10-point font, or a monthly supervisor briefing, or a meeting called after an accident. The alternative he showed was a concentration diagram — posted near a time clock or in a prominent area, showing where injuries had occurred, color-coded for days versus nights. Employees saw the pattern at a glance. The display revealed that injuries were concentrated in specific work types. In one specific case, a Northeast city had shifted from buying 25-pound bags of salt for sidewalk spreading to 50-pound bags because purchasing got a better deal. The senior employees on the day shift had said at the time that the bags were too heavy. Their voices weren't heard. The data display made the connection visible in a way that opinions and verbal complaints had not.
The second example was Boca Raton's accounts payable function. The team tracked errors coming into AP over a roughly 10-day window. The data showed 169 errors, with one department accounting for 93 of them and "invoice sent to the department first instead of accounts payable" accounting for another 55. The team had framed the work explicitly as understanding the process rather than catching anyone — and the data made the leverage points obvious. Cutting the largest concentration in half would have produced more than a 50 percent improvement in the error rate overall.
The point Harry kept returning to is that concentration diagrams are dramatically more useful than brainstorming, fishbone diagrams, or affinity diagrams in most situations. He called the latter category "organized guesswork." Let the data lead. The countermeasures that emerge from data-led analysis are more accurate and more accepted than the ones that emerge from group speculation.
The ninth commandment is 5S — Sort, Set in order, Shine, Standardize, Sustain. Some practitioners add Safety as a sixth S. Harry recommends thinking of safety as integrated throughout rather than as a separate category.
The bottom-line value of 5S is finding things quickly. Harry suggested half-jokingly that "find stuff" should be the seventh S. People waste large amounts of time looking for tools, files, supplies, information. Eliminating that search time is one of the most reliable improvements available in any organization.
His example was a federal agency with a large campus, 500-plus employees, and a maintenance function. They received three hours of training on 5S and visual controls on day one. Then 30 employees per month, over three months, worked through 5S implementation in various buildings on site. By the end of three months, 90 employees had been involved. The productivity improvement was approximately 20 percent. Simple. Straightforward. Real.
5S works in offices, in shared drives, in email systems, in workshops. Harry mentioned that the Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA) has published a series of papers specifically on 5S for information — how to organize shared drives, computers, and email so that finding things doesn't consume the productivity that the rest of the improvement program is trying to create.
The tenth commandment is where the cultural work lives. Harry framed it as a question about learning.
You can't teach or coach someone who doesn't want to learn. That's the precondition. Try as you might, the people who don't want to develop won't develop. The first question for any leadership program is whether the participants actually want to learn this — to learn how to lead differently, to learn how to coach, to learn how to apply the techniques in their own work.
For those who do want to learn, Harry is a firm believer in Mike Rother's Kata approach. Rother's working definition: a new behavior that is converted into a new permanent habit through deliberate practice. Harry would add coaching to that — deliberate practice supported by structured coaching is what converts knowledge into habit. Training sessions alone don't do it. Books don't do it. People walk out of supervisor training without the new behaviors stuck. The practice and the coaching, not the training event, is what produces the change.
From a Lean standpoint, Harry sees three fundamental capabilities a leader must develop.
The first is the ability to coach. This requires feedback, practice, and time to convert into habit. Most leaders develop their model of being a supervisor by mimicking the mentors they had, and most of those mentors operated in a tell-people-what-to-do mode. The smart person in the room dispenses answers. Coaching is the opposite — developing capability in others by guiding them rather than directing them.
The second is working with people to understand waste. The supervisor or leader needs to be personally proficient with the categories of waste — the TIMWOOD or DOWNTIME acronyms that help people remember the eight categories — before they can coach their employees on identifying waste in their own work. Leading by example matters here. If the leader doesn't visibly work on waste, the employees won't either.
The third is PDCA problem-solving capability, including A3 thinking. The leader needs to practice the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle on their own problems and post their A3s where employees can see them. The practice produces the proficiency. The proficiency produces the ability to coach. The coaching produces the capability in the team.
Across all three, Harry kept returning to one specific weakness in most organizations. People skip past clarifying the problem. A meeting forms around a problem statement. Six people sit at the table. Within minutes, solutions are being proposed. If you stopped the conversation and asked each person to write down what the problem actually was, you'd get six different answers. The discipline of taking the time to define the real problem — writing it down, inviting clarification, reaching genuine consensus on what is being solved — is one of the most consequential and most neglected practices in problem-solving work.
The other point Harry emphasized: make sure the measurement system is sound. Before whipping through PDCA or running an A3, verify that the measurement system can reliably tell you what's happening. The example he used was social workers assessing in-home care needs. If three social workers visit the same household and reach three different judgments about appropriate care — meals on wheels versus 24-hour nursing home care — the data downstream will be all over the place. The cost difference between those judgments is enormous. The measurement system isn't a side issue. It's foundational.
The session closed with the practical question of where to begin. Harry called his framework the proven path — proven because organizations have actually walked it, and because the alternatives have been tried and have not worked as well.
The starting point is top-management training. Harry was clear: if top management doesn't want to go through the training themselves, QPIC will walk away from the engagement. Lean implementations that depend on senior leaders being committed without senior leaders being trained don't survive contact with operational reality.
Top management goes through training along with internally selected coach candidates. The group then does a few kaizen events together, which creates the knowledge base for the organization to make informed decisions about scaling — what RFPs or RFQs to write, what coaches to bring on board, what the work actually looks like up close.
The tools phase comes next. Coaches build skill sets. Knowledge transfers into the organization. Tools get used in real contexts.
The culture phase runs alongside the tools phase. A steering committee gets set up. Accountability mapping develops — vision, mission, values, key outcomes that support those, and metrics that flow from the outcomes. Leadership buy-in becomes leadership commitment. Harry used the old line: with ham and eggs, the pig was committed and the chicken was involved. Management cameo appearances, where senior leaders show up occasionally without leading by example or using the tools themselves, produce tools-based Lean efforts that may or may not survive. Genuine commitment produces cultural change.
Harry's working ratio for successful implementations: tools are 15 to 20 percent. Culture is 80 to 85 percent. Organizations that invert that ratio — that overweight tools and underweight culture — get to a plateau and stop. The ones that get the proportion right keep going.
The framework Harry walked through depends on a specific kind of infrastructure that doesn't get talked about as a tool. The infrastructure is the ability to see what's happening across the improvement program at a level of detail and frequency that supports the leadership behaviors Harry described.
Dynamic data collection — the eighth commandment — is fundamentally about visibility at the level of daily work. Concentration diagrams on walls near time clocks. Check sheets at workstations. Simple tick-mark grids that the people doing the work can fill in during the work. The local visibility is where the engagement starts. But local visibility doesn't scale by itself. If one work area's concentration diagram shows a pattern that another area should know about, the infrastructure to make that visible across the organization is what determines whether the second area learns from the first or re-derives the same insight independently.
The same applies to kaizen volume. Harry's benchmark of one idea per employee per month implemented is not a benchmark a spreadsheet can sustain. The administrative overhead of tracking that many improvements through approval, implementation, measurement, and sustainment is what kills most attempts at high-volume idea systems. Infrastructure that makes the workflow tractable — routing ideas to owners, surfacing stalled work, tracking impact, making the activity visible to leaders — is what separates programs that scale from programs that collapse under their own weight.
The leadership disciplines Harry described in commandment ten depend on visibility too. A leader practicing PDCA visibly, posting A3s for employees to see, coaching by asking questions about ongoing improvement work — these require the work to be visible somewhere. The work needs a home that's accessible to the leader and to the team. Where that home is the leader's filing cabinet or a shared drive nobody opens, the practice fades. Where it's a system that surfaces the work in context, the practice sustains.
Benchmarking — the seventh commandment — has the same dependence. The reason public-sector Lean efforts often re-solve problems other agencies have already solved is that the solutions aren't visible across agencies. Within an organization, the equivalent problem is solutions that aren't visible across departments or facilities. Infrastructure that makes improvements searchable, comparable, and adaptable is what turns one team's solution into a candidate solution for every team facing the same problem.
None of this changes what Harry was teaching. The commandments are the commandments. The coaching is the coaching. The discipline of clarifying the problem before jumping to solutions is the discipline. What infrastructure does is keep the work from getting buried in administrative overhead, keep the leadership behaviors connected to real work the leaders can see, and make the improvements visible at the scale where they can actually compound. Harry's 80–85 percent culture estimate depends on the visibility holding up under daily pressure. Without infrastructure that supports it, the visibility erodes and the culture work erodes with it.
What's the difference between kaizen events and daily kaizen? Kaizen events are three-to-five-day full-time efforts where a cross-functional team works intensively on a specific process problem. They produce visible results and energize participants. Daily kaizen is the ongoing practice of frontline employees identifying and implementing small improvements as part of their regular work. Harry's benchmark for the daily form is one idea per employee per month implemented. Most organizations that stop at kaizen events plateau because the cultural shift doesn't happen. The events become a special activity rather than a way of working. Both forms have value. Neither replaces the other.
Why does Harry estimate that 50 percent or more of government processes are doing something different from what the law actually requires? Because statutes, laws, and ordinances are subject to interpretation drift over time. People who built knowledge about a specific regulation leave the organization, hand off to colleagues, and the interpretation drifts in transmission. Laws overlap with each other. Multiple statutes apply to the same process and get interpreted in combinations that produce procedures the original legislation didn't require. Clients almost always claim they're following everything to the letter. Looking carefully at the actual statutes versus the actual procedures consistently reveals gaps — sometimes large ones — that the organization had been unaware of.
What's the difference between an organization that does Lean tools and one that has a Lean culture? The first organization gets to a plateau and stops. The second keeps going. Harry's working ratio is that tools represent 15 to 20 percent of successful implementation, and culture represents 80 to 85 percent. Organizations that overweight tools deploy 5S boards, run kaizen events, build value stream maps — and then return to business as usual when the events end. Organizations that invest in the cultural work develop leaders who coach rather than direct, build daily improvement habits across the workforce, and sustain the gains. The hard part is that culture is invisible. Tools are visible. The temptation to invest in what's visible is what produces the tools-stalled implementation.
Why does Harry emphasize coaching so heavily? Because coaching is what converts knowledge into capability and capability into habit. Training sessions don't produce sustained behavior change. Books don't either. People walk out of supervisor training without the new behaviors stuck. The combination of deliberate practice and structured coaching is what produces the change. Harry credited Mike Rother's Kata approach as the most developed methodology for this. The Kata coaching pattern — a structured set of questions the coach asks the learner daily at a storyboard — gives both sides a defined framework and produces measurable improvement in scientific thinking habits over time.
Why are concentration diagrams better than brainstorming or fishbone diagrams? Because they let the data lead. Brainstorming, fishbone diagrams, and affinity diagrams are forms of structured guesswork — they generate hypotheses about what might be causing a problem, but they don't tell you which hypotheses are correct. Concentration diagrams display where problems actually occurred. The patterns in the data tell you what's happening before anyone has to speculate. The countermeasures that emerge from data-led analysis are more accurate and more accepted than those that emerge from group speculation. Harry's recommendation is to use concentration diagrams as the primary tool for understanding most problems, and to reach for brainstorming-style methods only when the data genuinely doesn't suggest a direction.
What does Harry mean by a "challenging goal"? At least 50 percent improvement from the current baseline. If a process takes 60 days, the challenge target is 30, not 56. The point of the challenge level is that it cannot be achieved by doing the work the way it's currently being done. The current thinking won't produce that kind of result, which forces the team to think differently and use the Lean tools to redesign the process. Incremental targets — 56 days instead of 60 — produce incremental improvements that don't change anything fundamental. Challenge targets force fundamental change.
Why is one-stop shopping the ideal customer experience? Because handoffs introduce delays, errors, and frustration. The customer who has to be routed between three people to handle their need is experiencing the organization's internal structure rather than the organization's actual service. One-stop shopping eliminates the handoffs — one person handles the customer's full need without passing them around. Implementing it sometimes requires job restructuring and union engagement, but the difficulty of those conversations is the work. Avoiding the conversation produces the experience customers already complain about. The ideal is the customer being able to do the entire interaction online without needing a person at all, but where in-person interaction is required, the goal is making that interaction complete in one touch.
How do you handle staff members who add value but resist Lean tools? Get them engaged early. Most resistance comes from people who haven't been invited into the process and who feel that Lean is being done to them rather than with them. Bring them into kaizen events. Tap into their ideas and frustrations. Let them see that they'll have a voice and be heard. Harry referenced John Kotter's website at Harvard as a resource for change management strategies, including a structured series of questions that surfaces the specific source of resistance and offers responses. The elevator-speech framing — what we're doing, why we're doing it, what's expected of you, what's in it for you — gives people the four bullet points they need to understand the work before they can engage with it productively.
What does benchmarking actually look like in practice? For public-sector organizations, benchmarking is wide open. Other cities, counties, agencies, and school systems are usually willing to share what they've done because they're not competing with each other. The Baldrige database alone provides examples from K-12 school systems that have won the national award. Harry's experience is that organizations who reach out to peer organizations and ask "what have you been doing in this area?" almost always get useful information back, and the peer organizations are often equally interested in what the asking organization is going to try. The main value of benchmarking isn't just learning specific solutions. It's establishing a higher starting plateau than the organization would have set for itself, which makes the improvement work compound faster.
What's the role of statistical thinking in this framework? It's foundational rather than central. Harry's background is in Six Sigma at the Master Black Belt level, and his work with Deming over three years at MIT informed his approach to variation. The principle that organizations should distinguish between common-cause variation (normal noise) and special-cause variation (real signals) underlies the dynamic data collection commandment. Concentration diagrams, check sheets, and process behavior charts are statistical tools, even when they're displayed as simple wall posters. Six Sigma's DMAIC framework — Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control — gets used for harder, more data-intensive problems where Lean tools alone aren't enough. But Harry's emphasis is that Lean carries the heavier leverage in most situations, with Six Sigma and Shainin techniques layered in for specialized problems.
Why does Harry insist that top management go through training before any implementation work begins? Because without top management proficiency in the tools, the leadership behaviors that sustain Lean don't happen. Senior leaders who haven't done the training don't recognize what they're seeing when they walk the gemba, can't coach their teams effectively, and tend to make cameo appearances at improvement events rather than leading by example. The organizations Harry has seen succeed at Lean are organizations where top leadership did the work themselves first. The organizations that fail are organizations where leadership delegated the work to a CI office and stayed at arm's length. QPIC walks away from engagements where senior management isn't willing to go through the training. The walk-away is a sign of how foundational the principle is.
How do you help people get better at clarifying the problem before jumping to solutions? Make the problem statement visible. Write it on a flip chart or whiteboard. Invite discussion and clarification. Have multiple people restate it in their own words. Harry's example was union grievance handling, where bringing five union members into a meeting and writing up "this is the grievance" almost always produces "no, that's not it" from other members until the actual problem reaches consensus. The discipline isn't natural for most groups, which is why coaching is so valuable here. Someone needs to call timeout when the group is jumping to solutions and bring the conversation back to whether everyone is genuinely working on the same problem. Harry's framing from earlier in the session applies: legislation is a bunch of elegant solutions applied to misunderstood problems. The same pattern plays out in operational problem-solving when the problem hasn't been clarified well enough.
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