Watch the recording of the webinar:
View the slides (downloadable PDF):
Listen to the recording via our podcast:
After about three hundred Kaizen events across multiple industries and continents, Adam Lawrence had a recurring frustration he couldn't ignore. Teams would do extraordinary work during a Kaizen week. Smart people would solve problems that had been plaguing their organizations for years. The room would buzz on the last day. Leadership would commit. And then, weeks or months later, the problems would creep back. Not all at once. Not dramatically. Just enough drift that, by the next quarter, the gains were half-gone and nobody could quite say when it started.
He made it his mission over roughly the past decade to stop that pattern. The result is the framework he walked through in this session — eight spokes connected to a central hub of leadership commitment, organized as a wheel because the metaphor is operationally exact. Remove any spoke and the wheel still rolls, but with weakness. Remove the hub and the wheel falls apart.
What makes the framework worth taking seriously isn't its novelty. It isn't novel. Most of the individual elements — chartering, training and review, mistake-proofing, layered audits, visible standards, accountability — show up across the Lean literature in various forms. What's distinctive is the integration. Adam's argument is that the elements have to be present together, designed into the Kaizen work itself rather than added afterward as homework. The wheel gets implemented during the event, not after it. That's the load-bearing design choice.
The session is structured as a working walk through each element, with worked examples from his three decades of facilitation, a healthy dose of audience interaction, and a frank acknowledgment that the framework itself is the result of about 150 PDSA iterations. The version he presented is the best he has at the moment. He's confident the next version will be better.
Adam Lawrence is managing partner of Process Improvement Partners, LLC. He has more than 30 years of experience in process improvement targeted at manufacturing and business processes and has facilitated over 300 Kaizen events in multiple industries around the world. He earned a BS in Industrial Engineering from Virginia Tech and Lean certifications from the University of Michigan. He has been a guest on Mark Graban's "Lean Blog Interviews" and "My Favorite Mistake" podcasts. He is the author of "The Wheel of Sustainability: Engaging and Empowering Teams to Produce Lasting Results."
Most Lean content treats leadership commitment as an opening pleasantry. Of course leaders need to be committed. Now let's talk about the real work.
Adam's framing makes the commitment specific enough to be useful. Leadership commitment in his framework is the willingness to say yes to whatever the team needs across every other spoke of the wheel — and the discipline to operationalize that willingness through a structured chartering conversation before the event begins.
The chartering has four parts.
The problem statement. Specific enough that everyone can recognize when it's solved. Not "we're not servicing the customer as well as we'd like." Specific. "It takes us 14 days to service the customer. Industry average is eight. We need six to be best in class." Adam pushes leaders past vague pain into measurable pain because measurable pain is the only kind a team can commit to relieving.
The objective. What does winning look like? Cut the 14 days to six. Implement two safety improvements per team member. Whatever the win is, it has to be visible enough that the team can tell, during the event, whether they're on track to hit it. Adam used the word "winning" a lot during the session, and the framing is operational rather than motivational. People can tell when they're winning, and that knowledge sustains effort in a way that abstract commitment can't.
The winning team. Who should be on it? People in the process, customers of the process, suppliers to the process, an objective outside perspective, sometimes someone from another location. Adam coaches leaders to walk the gemba before chartering and identify the people with genuine passion for the problem. The team isn't assembled by org chart. It's assembled by interest, capability, and connection to the work.
The owner of the output. Who takes 24/7 responsibility for what the team produces when the event ends? Ideally the team leader, because they have the authority to marshal ongoing resources and the contextual knowledge to recognize when something the team proposes would violate policy, safety standards, or operational reality. Adam was direct: this person is the one who will keep the team from doing something stupid, illegal, or out of policy. The role is governance, not gatekeeping.
The charter becomes a contract. The leader commits to making the team 100 percent available — clearing calendars, treating the event time as non-negotiable except for family or safety emergencies — and to saying yes to what the team requests. The team commits to working the problem to a sustainable solution.
The "say yes" commitment is the part most leaders find hardest to internalize. The team will ask for things. Time. Effort. Help. Sometimes money. Adam's coaching is that the leader has to be able to say yes, because the team has earned the right to that response through the chartering contract. The facilitator's job is to keep the team focused on the right requests. The leader's job is not to second-guess the requests once they're made.
A question came in early about how to get leadership commitment when there are time constraints. Adam's answer was a story. A plant in Vancouver, Washington was running a changeover reduction event projected to save between one and three million dollars annually. The plant manager asked Adam how to justify pulling two team members from another location for the week. Adam asked him to think of anything else going on that week worth up to three million dollars. The question answered itself. The point of the story isn't that every Kaizen has million-dollar stakes. The point is that chartering produces the data that makes the resource conversation simple. Without the chartering work, leaders make resource decisions on gut feel. With it, they make them on numbers.
Notification is the broadest-reach element of the wheel and, in Adam's framing, the entry point but not the load-bearing one. It's where the organization is told about the change.
The discipline isn't about content. It's about why. People in the audience have to feel that the change happened in their best interest, the customer's interest, their safety, their productivity, their daily experience. The message has to be short. It has to be clear. And the people delivering it — both leaders and team members — have to look like they care, because the audience is reading them as much as the words.
Adam was direct about the limits of this element. Notification in a group setting reliably loses about 92 percent of the audience within three minutes. Forty people in the room, three asking questions, the rest checking phones or thinking about their next meeting. The element is necessary but not sufficient. It exists to set the stage for the more durable elements that follow.
This is where Adam's framework borrows most directly from Training Within Industry. The mechanism is one-on-one. Tell, show, do.
The team members who built the change are the ones who train the rest of the organization. If a team of twelve people needs to reach three hundred employees, that's twenty-five one-on-one interactions per team member. The conversation goes: tell the person about the change, show them how to do it, then have them show you they can do it. The interaction takes longer than a group meeting. It's also dramatically more effective.
The reason it works is structural. In a group meeting, the person receiving the new standard is mostly thinking about what the thirty-seven other people in the room think. In a one-on-one, they're thinking about the work. The barrier to asking the difficult question — the one they're embarrassed to ask in public — drops to near zero. The trainer learns what the audience actually doesn't understand, which is information no group meeting will surface honestly. And the trainee experiences the change as something the organization cared enough to walk them through personally, which materially changes whether they treat it as serious.
The investment shows that leadership cares. The investment also produces the feedback the team needs to refine the standard before it spreads further.
This is where Adam went deepest with the audience interaction, and the demonstration is worth pulling out in full because it makes the principle concrete in a way explanations don't.
He started by drawing a tool — recognizably a wrench, though his drawing skills produced some debate in the chat about whether it might be a spanner or some other implement. The question was: what is it?
The audience eventually agreed it was a wrench, but they couldn't tell more than that. He added detail: 9/16. Now they knew the size. But they still didn't know where it belonged. He added more: a label indicating which shop it came from. Now they knew where to return it. He drew the outline of the tool on the shop's tool board. Now they knew its specific home. And he added one more layer — a label inside the outline showing exactly which tool fits there — because the outline alone isn't impossible to do wrong. A three-quarter wrench is wider than a 9/16 wrench but might still fit roughly inside a generic outline.
The progression matters because most organizations stop at the outline. The outline looks like 5S. The team feels finished. But the goal isn't "looks like 5S." The goal is "impossible to do the wrong thing." If a different tool can be placed in the wrong outline, the work isn't done.
Adam's framing was that the model is Disney World. People from every continent, every age, every language, walk into the park and know where to stand, where to go, and roughly how long they'll wait. They know all of that because Disney has invested in making it nearly impossible to do the wrong thing. The principle applies operationally everywhere. Make the right action obvious. Make the wrong action structurally impossible. The three extra seconds it takes to add the inside label saves hundreds of seconds across the lifetime of the tool board.
The diagnostic question Adam embeds in his teams' heads is: how do I know? How do I know they're doing it right? How do I know if they have what they need? How do I know if the tool is in the right place? The question is annoying enough that his teams complain about hearing it. The annoyance is the point. Eventually they start asking it themselves, which is the actual outcome he's training for.
A question came up about whether mistake-proofing eliminates creativity. Adam's answer was the opposite. Simplifying the mundane mechanics of a job — picking the right tool, finding the right supply, knowing where the work belongs — frees cognitive capacity for the creative work. Standard work isn't the enemy of creativity. Mental load is. Removing the mental load of repetitive decisions opens space for improvement thinking.
Once the team has identified what good standard work looks like, they need to be able to access it without searching or transporting. The principle is simple: locate everything logically where it's needed, in the quantity needed, with redundancy where redundancy serves flow.
Adam's example was a weld shop he worked with a few years earlier, which he described as the nicest weld shop he'd ever seen. The team's response time to support a down factory line had gone from two hours to ten seconds. Not by working faster. By making sure every tool was already where it needed to be, with the right quantity at each location, so that the time previously spent finding and transporting tools had been eliminated.
The leadership commitment shows up sharply here. If the team determines they need three of a particular wrench, the leader has to say yes. No questioning whether two would do. No asking if the team has considered other options. The team has analyzed the work. The team has authority on the question. The leader's job is to fund the answer.
Adam was direct about the trust this requires. Teams will sometimes propose more redundancy than strictly necessary. The risk of saying yes too often is small. The risk of saying no too often is large, because every "no" teaches the team that the contract from chartering wasn't real. The chartering said the leader would say yes to what the team needs. Saying no once breaks the contract.
There are limits. Some tools are expensive enough or tracked enough that infinite redundancy isn't workable. Adam's framing for those cases is to formalize check-in and check-out processes, but only if doing so doesn't slow the work down. If the tracking process requires finding a key holder who's been out for two days, the tracking process is the problem. The principle that governs everything else applies here too: structure that supports the work is good, structure that interrupts the work is waste regardless of its stated purpose.
This is the spoke teams typically dislike, because it requires them to leave the event room and talk to people who haven't been part of the work.
Adam sends his teams out on day one or day one and a half — not at the end. They go to the gemba. They find the people who will live with the new standard. They explain what's coming and ask for input. Sometimes they get yelled at. Sometimes they get asked questions they hadn't considered. Sometimes someone points out that the team designed for right-handers and there are lefties on the floor.
The dynamic is uncomfortable, and Adam said his teams have been called to the principal's office a few times because of feedback that escalated. He counts that as part of the work. The discomfort is what produces the refinement.
The deeper principle is that at 2 a.m., when no facilitator is on site to manage the process, the only thing that keeps people following the new standard is whether the standard makes their work easier, safer, or more sensible. If they can't see the benefit personally, they won't sustain the behavior. The clear benefits conversation isn't optional. It's the test of whether the design will hold under the actual conditions of daily work.
Leadership commitment shows up again here. Leaders have to be willing to let their teams go take feedback that won't always be kind, and they have to back the teams when the conversations get hard. The team is acting in the interest of the broader organization. They're not always going to be received that way in the moment. Leadership's job is to make sure that the team's accountability for the design extends only to the design itself, not to managing the emotional reactions of everyone they encounter.
Audits in Adam's framework have specific design constraints. They have to take less than five minutes, because anyone can clear five minutes on their calendar and almost no one can clear an hour. They have to be visual enough that anyone can tell at a glance whether the work is in the right state. They have to be simple enough that anyone can be an auditor, not just specialists.
The layering matters. The person doing the work audits their own work continuously. The person managing them audits less frequently. Their manager less frequently still. All the way up to the CEO, who should be walking through a process once a year or once a quarter, observing whether the system looks healthy, looking for where help is needed.
The two-way nature is the part most audit programs get wrong. Adam framed it as a conversation, not an inspection. The auditor is learning about the work. The auditee is learning how important the work is. Together they're assessing the system. Where the work is being done well, the auditor congratulates the person. Where it isn't, the auditor redirects the behavior in the moment and explains why the redirection matters. The exchange reinforces the importance of the standard in a way that punitive audits cannot.
The cadence isn't about catching people doing the wrong thing. It's about creating regular touchpoints where the standard stays present in everyone's daily awareness. Without those touchpoints, the standard fades from view. With them, it remains a live part of the work.
Adam's image for accountability was deliberate and uncomfortable. If you saw a small child about to touch a hot stove, you would jump up from whatever you were doing to prevent it. You might yell. The child might cry. They might even resent you in the moment. None of that would stop you from acting, because the alternative — letting them burn their hand — is unacceptable.
That's the standard for sustaining improvement work. If you walk past someone doing the work the wrong way, what you're communicating to them and to everyone watching is that the change isn't real. The new standard isn't important enough to interrupt your meeting for. The team's work doesn't matter enough to defend.
Adam was honest that this is much easier said than done. People are late for meetings. The wrong moment to intervene is real. But the willingness to intervene is what separates sustained improvement from theatrical improvement. The people watching — and there are always people watching — calibrate their own behavior based on what the organization tolerates. If the organization tolerates drift, drift becomes the norm. If the organization consistently redirects, the new standard becomes the norm.
The intervention isn't punitive. It's caring enough to spend the time. The person doing the work the wrong way may not have seen the new sign. May not have attended the training. May have a question they were embarrassed to ask. The redirect is also a conversation, the same way audits are. But the willingness to have it has to be real.
Adam's framing in chartering was that leaders need to commit to this responsibility at the front end, before the work begins. If a leader isn't willing to step in when necessary, the work shouldn't move forward. The wheel only holds together if the hub does.
Recognition in Adam's framework isn't trophies or bonuses. It's storytelling — recognizing that a cause created an effect, and telling the story of how the cause produced the effect across the organization, across time, across audiences who weren't there.
The discipline he coaches is to have team members tell the story of what they did, why they did it, and what the impact has been. They tell it to one audience. Then another. Then another. The story compounds. Over time, the goal is for people who weren't on the team — who weren't even present when the work happened — to tell the same story as if they had been. When that happens, the work has entered the organization's collective memory in a way that no document or dashboard can match.
Adam connected this to deeper human history. Before written records, family histories and scientific observations and natural knowledge were transmitted through stories told and retold across generations. The form persists because it works. Stories carry information through time better than data does, because they carry the emotional context that makes the information memorable.
For Kaizen sustainment, storytelling does something specific. It gets more people excited to solve other problems the same way. It creates demand for the next Kaizen event from areas that watched the first one and want their turn. The first business problem you solve is the hardest. The fifth one is easier, because by then the organization has heard the stories and built the appetite.
Leaders should be the primary storytellers, and the stories should be selected to highlight the elements of the wheel that produced the result. Not just what changed, but how the team made the change durable. Not just what was solved, but how the solution was sustained. Stories that emphasize the durability create demand for the durability practices in the next cycle.
A question late in the session asked what the early warning signs are that chaos is creeping back into a stabilized process, and how to fight the urge to revert to firefighting.
Adam's signs were specific. The one-on-one training sessions stop happening for new employees. Audits aren't being completed at the agreed cadence. A tool goes missing from the tool board and nobody notices. Someone is observed not following the standard and excuses are being made for them. Each of these signals on its own might be small. Together, they're the early shape of regression.
His advice was twofold. The first was to never back off on the sustaining behaviors, even when business pressure makes everything else feel urgent. The disciplines that hold the wheel together don't take much time, but they do require deliberate attention. The five-minute audits, the storytelling, the one-on-one conversations when something is drifting — none of these are expensive. Letting them lapse is.
The second was to lean into wins. Adam said he regularly receives pictures from past clients showing areas adjacent to the original Kaizen — areas the team didn't formally work on — that have been organized to the same standard. Someone on a neighboring team watched the original work, saw the improvement, and asked to be next. The discipline of leadership at that point is to grab on. The opportunities don't fall to your feet forever. When a team starts asking for help applying the wheel to their own area, that's the moment to say yes — not in three months when the budget cycle allows it. The energy for change is at its peak in the moment someone first asks.
The argument across this session is that sustaining Kaizen results is a design problem, not an enforcement problem. The wheel doesn't sustain anything through willpower. It sustains through the structural choices that make the right action easy and the wrong action visible — chartering before the event begins, training one-on-one with everyone the change touches, mistake-proofing rather than reminding, layered audits that take five minutes, storytelling that compounds across audiences.
What infrastructure does in this context is make those design choices visible enough across an organization that the wheel doesn't fall apart when the original facilitator moves on. The chartering work belongs in the same place as the Kaizen event documentation belongs in the same place as the follow-up audits belong in the same place as the impact tracking. Without that integration, the wheel becomes eight different practices in eight different systems, and the disconnection itself becomes a source of regression.
The audit discipline Adam describes — five-minute, visual, layered, simple enough that anyone can do it — depends on the audits being trackable across the organization without requiring a spreadsheet someone has to maintain by hand. The recognition work — the storytelling that compounds across audiences — depends on the stories being accessible enough that they can actually spread, with the context of the work that produced the result. The accountability work — stepping in when someone is drifting from the standard — depends on the standard being visible at the moment the drift happens, not buried in a document nobody opens.
None of this changes the underlying argument. The wheel is the work. The leadership behaviors are the work. The eight spokes are the work. What infrastructure does is remove the structural reasons that good wheel design fails to scale beyond the original facilitator — the lost audits, the invisible stories, the standards that exist in one binder somewhere and never get into the workflow that depends on them.
What is the Wheel of Sustainability? A framework Adam Lawrence developed across roughly a decade of facilitating Kaizen events, organized as a central hub of leadership commitment connected to eight spokes that together sustain critical improvements after the original event ends. The metaphor is operationally exact. Remove any spoke and the wheel still rolls but with weakness. Remove the hub and the wheel falls apart.
Why do most Kaizen results fade after the event? Because the sustaining behaviors weren't designed into the event itself. The team produced a good solution but didn't notify the broader organization in a one-on-one way, didn't make the standard visible enough to be unmistakable, didn't build mistake-proofing into the workplace, didn't establish audit cadences anyone can sustain in five minutes, and didn't create the recognition stories that keep the work alive in collective memory. Each of these is an element of the wheel. The wheel has to be implemented during the Kaizen, not afterward as homework.
What is chartering, and why is it so important? A structured conversation with leadership before the Kaizen event begins, covering four things: the problem (specific and measurable), the objective (what winning looks like), the winning team (who participates and why), and the owner of the output (who takes responsibility for what the team produces after the event ends). The charter functions as a contract. Leadership commits to making the team fully available and to saying yes to what the team needs. The team commits to working the problem to a sustainable solution. Without good chartering, the wheel has nothing to hold together.
What does "say yes" mean in a leadership commitment context? When the team — having been chartered, given authority over a specific problem, and trusted to design the solution — asks for resources, time, help, or specific equipment, the leader's default is yes. The facilitator's job is to keep the team's requests focused on what actually serves the design. The leader's job is not to second-guess the requests once they've been made. Every "no" once chartering is complete teaches the team that the contract wasn't real, which is a much higher cost than the individual request being declined.
What's the difference between an outline on a tool board and "impossible to do the wrong thing"? An outline tells you where a tool generally goes. It doesn't tell you exactly which tool fits there. A different tool of similar size can still fit in the outline, which means the wrong tool can be stored in the right place and nobody will notice until someone needs the original tool and it's missing. Adding a label inside the outline that specifies exactly which tool belongs makes the wrong placement structurally impossible. Most 5S work stops at the outline because the outline looks finished. Adam's framing is to go one step further: ask "how do I know?" until the answer is "anyone walking by could tell."
Why one-on-one training instead of group meetings? Because group meetings reliably lose about 92 percent of the audience within three minutes. The person in a group meeting is mostly thinking about what the other thirty-nine people in the room think, not about the content. In a one-on-one, the trainee can ask the difficult question they were embarrassed to ask in public, and the trainer can see exactly which parts of the change are landing and which aren't. The investment of time is larger per person. The investment of attention is dramatically larger. Group meetings remain useful for notification — telling the organization the change exists — but the actual transfer of capability happens one-on-one.
Does mistake-proofing eliminate creativity? The opposite. Mistake-proofing removes the cognitive load of routine decisions — finding the right tool, looking up the right size, remembering which folder a file belongs in — which frees mental capacity for the work that genuinely requires creativity. Standard work isn't the enemy of creative thinking. Mental load is. Removing the load opens space for improvement.
What makes a good audit in this framework? Less than five minutes long. Visual enough that anyone can tell at a glance whether the work is in the right state. Simple enough that anyone can be the auditor, not just specialists. Two-way, framed as a conversation rather than an inspection — the auditor learns about the work, the auditee learns how important the work is, and together they assess the system. Layered, so the person doing the work audits continuously, their manager audits less frequently, and so on up to the CEO who walks through a process once a quarter or once a year.
How do you intervene when someone is doing the work the wrong way? Adam's image was a child about to touch a hot stove. You jump up. You're late to your meeting. You explain in the moment why this matters. You redirect the behavior. The intervention isn't punitive — the person may not have seen the new sign, attended the training, or felt comfortable asking a question they had. The redirect is also a conversation. But the willingness to interrupt your own day for it is what tells everyone watching that the change is real. Walking past tells them the change isn't real, regardless of what the posters say.
Why is storytelling part of the framework? Because stories carry information through time better than documents do. Adam's discipline is to have team members tell the story of what they did, why they did it, and what the impact has been — repeatedly, across audiences, including audiences who weren't there when the work happened. The goal is for people who weren't on the team to eventually tell the story as if they had been. When that happens, the work has entered the organization's collective memory in a way that no dashboard can match. Storytelling also creates demand for the next Kaizen event in areas that watched the first one and want their turn.
What are the early signs that chaos is creeping back into a stabilized process? The one-on-one training sessions stop happening for new employees. Audits aren't being completed at the agreed cadence. A tool goes missing and nobody notices. Someone is observed not following the standard and excuses are being made for them. Each signal on its own is small. Together they're the shape of regression. The response is to lean back into the sustaining behaviors and, when adjacent teams start asking to apply the wheel to their own area, to say yes quickly — because the energy for change is at its peak in the moment someone first asks.
How is the Wheel of Sustainability different from a checklist? A checklist is something you tick off after the work is done. The wheel is designed into the work as it happens. Chartering happens before the Kaizen begins. Notification, training, visible evidence, mistake-proofing, clear benefits conversations, audit design, accountability structures, and the first storytelling all happen during the event. The team leaves the event with the sustaining mechanisms already in place, not with a list of things they need to do later. Most Kaizen events fail to sustain because the sustaining work was treated as homework rather than part of the event itself.
.svg)
Copyright © 2026
Privacy Policy