KaiNexus CEO and co-founder Greg Jacobson joins host Mark Graban for the twelfth episode of the Ask Us Anything series, the recurring session built around questions from webinar attendees. The questions in this batch share a theme worth naming: most of what gets called a culture problem in continuous improvement is actually a design problem. How an organization invites people in, what it asks for first, what it does with quotas, how it earns leadership buy-in, and how it uses kaizen events all turn out to be design choices. Get them right and engagement rises on its own. Get them wrong and no amount of exhortation will rescue them.
Here is what the episode covers and the thinking behind each answer.
An attendee in Malaysia wrote in about a factory where operators do not want to engage in improvement because they feel it does not benefit them. He had heard that workers in Japan participate without needing rewards, and asked how to convince his team that continuous improvement is win-win.
Mark started with a story from a Toyota plant tour in Japan. The guide, who worked in public affairs, showed the group hooks she had installed at each spot along the tour route where she stopped to talk. She had not liked setting her bag on the floor. She mentioned the idea to her supervisor, maintenance installed the hooks, and that was the Kaizen. Purely self-motivated. The lesson transfers cleanly to Malaysia, Thailand, or the United States: the way you show employees that Kaizen is win-win is to start by asking for ideas that would be a win for them. "What frustrates you at work?" is an easy place to start. The win for the organization arrives as a byproduct.
Greg added the pattern KaiNexus sees in the data. When an organization runs this kind of bottom-up first wave, staff satisfaction is usually the dominant category of impact in year one, often more than half. As that initial backlog clears, the categories shift. People can see past their immediate frustrations into the wider process, and safety, quality, and financial impact rise. He also surfaced an important wrinkle. The intended impact of an improvement is often not the actual impact. A KaiNexus customer once moved prescription filling for outpatients to a pharmacy down the hall purely for patient convenience. The unintended benefit was that pharmacy revenue rose by more than $200,000 a month, because patients started filling prescriptions they otherwise would not have. Start where people are frustrated and let the wider benefits compound.
Mark closed the segment by tying it to intrinsic motivation. Imai's "Kaizen" and Paul Akers's "2 Second Lean" both run on the same insight: people will improve their own work if you invite them to. Asking for cost cuts does not produce the same engagement. Asking what is hard about today's work does.
The same theme carried into a question about whether to use rewards or quotas. Mark named the two assumptions leaders default to when starting Kaizen, and rejected both. The first is that participation has to be mandatory. It does not. Invite people to work on problems that matter to them and they will participate because they want to. The second is that participation needs an incentive. It usually does not. Where it has been added, the incentive often becomes a bureaucracy that gets in the way, and the social science behind that, including Daniel Pink's "Drive," explains why.
Greg shared a useful turn from a customer. They had been running a quota of so many improvements per employee per year. The team came to KaiNexus asking for a "target line" feature, and in the course of designing it they walked themselves off the quota entirely and reframed it as an aspirational target. That distinction is the practical point. A target says "we would like to be here." A quota says "you are in trouble if you are not." Knowing where you want to end up is valuable. Punishing people for missing it produces the dysfunctional behavior that quotas are famous for.
Two related questions asked how to win over leaders who do not yet embrace continuous improvement, including allowing the people who do the work to drive opportunities. Greg framed both as conflict resolution problems. Find the common ground first. With frontline workers, the common ground is what frustrates them. With executives, the common ground is what they are trying to achieve this year, this quarter, in the next five years. Do not lead with continuous improvement, A3s, control charts, or strategy deployment. Lead with their goals. Then work backward to what would move the needle. By the time the work is producing results, leaders are doing continuous improvement before they have noticed the name for it. That is what makes improvement a practice rather than a program.
Mark added the strategic frame. Continuous improvement should be a means to an end, not the end itself. Doing it because it is trendy or because it seems right will not sustain anything. Driving sustainable long-term results, in safety, quality, customer and employee satisfaction, and financial performance, will. Pair bottom-up engagement on what employees see with top-down guidance on what the organization is trying to accomplish, in the style of hoshin kanri or strategy deployment. Leaders set the what and the why. They expect the how to come up from the work. And where leaders remain unconvinced, the answer is a small pilot. Pick a part of the organization, demonstrate that people participate, show the benefits, and earn the next round of authorization with evidence. Greg's addition was that, once the pilot is running, leaders need visibility into impact to keep authorizing the energy. Knowing the score is what keeps anyone in a game.
A reader asked about the process for determining scope and goals after defining the problem and business case for a kaizen event, which in healthcare is often called a rapid improvement event.
Mark recommended a specific reference, Karen Martin and Mike Osterling's "The Kaizen Event Planner," and described the realistic shape of the work. A week-long event usually requires more than a week of planning, often starting eight weeks ahead with a draft charter, team formation, and data collection. Scope and goals are iterative. You start with a candidate, run it past leaders, get input, and refine. Sometimes the scope shrinks because it was too broad. Sometimes pre-work surfaces information that reshapes the goal. The correlation between the amount and quality of planning and the actual outcome of the event is strong, though planning is not the same as scripting the week. Good planning means a reasonable scope, the right people in the room, and the conditions in place to actually pilot changes during the week rather than walking out with a to-do list.
Greg described where KaiNexus fits in the planning, and named the bigger problem the product was originally built to solve. The week itself is mostly people talking, mapping work on butcher paper, and going to the gemba, with the platform used to capture what comes out. The real value shows up afterward. An event that produces thirty potential improvements typically completes seven during the week, and the other twenty-three live or die on the 30-, 60-, and 90-day follow-ups. Without a shared system for that follow-through, those improvements quietly stall. Organizations that manage their events in KaiNexus see the remaining improvements actually get completed.
Then Greg made a sharper point about events themselves. Episodic improvement, by itself, does not build a culture of continuous improvement. There is real data behind that, and KaiNexus shows it in customer reporting. Events have their place as a top-down mechanism for solving large, systemic problems, but the idea that running one event a month produces a culture of daily improvement is wrong. Mark added the history. The "kaizen blitz" arrived in the United States in the 1980s, partly because it suited Japanese consulting firms flying people in and out for a week. The intent of those blitzes was to demonstrate that improvement was possible and to spark ongoing daily continuous improvement. The mistake was treating the demonstration as the program. He pointed to Mary Greeley Medical Center as a clean example. They ran a structured "Workout," a 90-day push to get every department to surface and complete an improvement, but they did it to build the foundation for ongoing daily Kaizen, which they later launched in select departments and spread from there. Big events and small improvements coexist, and both run on PDSA.
Greg closed with a piece of trivia from research he had done years earlier for an academic paper on improvement science in emergency medicine. Don Berwick is often credited with introducing Kaizen to healthcare, but the literature shows blitz-style improvement appearing in healthcare as early as the early 1980s, mostly in pharmacy departments. That is not a coincidence. Pharmacy departments are still among the most progressive adopters of these principles, and pharmacy was one of the first places healthcare borrowed the methods from.
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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