KaiNexus CEO and co-founder Greg Jacobson joins host Mark Graban for the thirteenth episode of the Ask Us Anything series, the recurring session built around questions from webinar attendees. The questions this time cluster around the soft side of Lean, the part most rollouts underweight: how to introduce change without triggering fear, how to talk about improvement without alienating people with jargon, how to sell Lean to leaders who do not yet see why they should care, and whether quotas help or hurt participation.
Here is what the episode covers and the thinking behind each answer.
An attendee named David asked how to implement Lean without scaring people with change, or with Japanese concepts and language. Mark started with the brain science. The amygdala, the fight-or-flight part of the human brain, fires in response to change, even change that is objectively good. Telling people not to be afraid of change is roughly equivalent to telling them not to be human. The more workable approach, drawn from a podcast Mark had done with UCLA psychologist Robert Maurer, is to make change small enough that it does not trigger that reaction. Engaging people in small improvements builds comfort with change over time, which is the real value of Kaizen as an entry point to Lean.
Greg pointed to a useful frame: people are not afraid of change, they are afraid of being changed. A political discourse course he had taken in college made the same point through a different lens, that people will change in front of you if you accept who they are first. The practical translation is in how you open the conversation. "We are going to change this process" lands as an imposition. "How can we change this process together to make your work easier" is an invitation. The same content, different reaction.
On Japanese terms, Greg was direct. He was once close to changing the name of KaiNexus itself, because the word references "Kaizen," and he is unusually committed to demystifying this work. The reflex he wants to break is the one he sees in medicine, where Latin and Greek terminology shut patients out of conversations about their own care. The less you depend on insider vocabulary, the better you do. Mark agreed and extended the point to the word "lean" itself. People hear it and assume scarcity. "We're already lean" is sometimes said in organizations to mean "we don't have enough staff," which is the opposite of what Lean management means. If a word is creating a barrier, drop it. Mark still uses "kaizen" because introducing the word opens a conversation about why kaizen is different from suggestion-box programs, but he uses "waste" instead of "muda" and recommends the same. Sometimes practitioners reach for Japanese terms to signal expertise, the way medicine reached for Latin in the 1800s. The effect is the same: it pushes people away rather than drawing them in.
An attendee named Roland wrote in with a question that had some frustration audible in it: when will management realize that the people closest to the issue usually have the best ideas? Both hosts read it as a real-organization frustration rather than a rhetorical question, and Greg used it to make a sharper point to the CI audience listening. Every organization is at a different place on its journey, and a CI leader's job is to figure out where their organization is and meet it there. Sometimes that means selling Lean to leadership. Reading the encyclopedia at them does not work. Listening, understanding their actual problems, and bringing the right piece of the toolkit to solve them is what works. By the time leaders are walking alongside the CI team, the teaching has already happened, mostly through them solving real problems together. The Socratic version produces durable understanding. The lecture version produces neither.
Mark connected it to the brain science from the previous question. Asking middle managers and executives to trust the frontline can be genuinely scary if they have spent decades being taught the opposite. Take baby steps. Expose them to situations that disprove their concerns. And recognize that this is now a marketing problem, not just a selling problem. If a leader is not in the market for what you are offering, selling does not work. Marketing comes first. One of the most useful pieces of marketing is testimonial. Mark was working with an organization at the time on exactly this, helping leaders understand by showing them video of a leader from another organization talking about their own initial skepticism and the moment they saw, tangibly, that their employees had ideas worth acting on. The bandwagon effect is real, and a credible peer voice carries weight that an internal advocate often cannot.
An attendee named Tanya asked for tips on applying Lean and Kaizen to parenting. Mark passed since he does not have kids. Greg took it in two pieces. The first was a smaller, practical example, a friend of his, a local dermatologist, was in Japan with his children on a Toyota factory tour. Exposing kids to the work itself is one way in. The second was bigger and more useful. The principles underneath continuous improvement are the principles of a growth mindset, the Carol Dweck idea that abilities can be developed through effort rather than being fixed traits. Greg has been applying that to how he talks with his six-year-old daughter about homework. The point of working on math and reading every day is not the facts. It is to make the brain stronger, because they will solve problems in five, twenty, and fifty years that nobody can predict. The Atlantic ran a useful piece in 2015 on the difference between praising kids for being smart, which can make them averse to mistakes, and praising them for working hard, which keeps them learning. The same instinct applies to children's video resources Greg recommended built around the Mojo character, which explain growth-mindset principles in language a six-year-old can follow.
Mark brought it back to the workplace. Continuous improvement is not a function of intelligence as measured by IQ or education. Everybody is the expert in their own work. Everybody has some innate creativity, whether or not they label themselves a creative person. Inviting people to see problems and propose changes works precisely because the capacity is widely distributed, not because it requires a particular kind of mind.
A KaiNexus prospect asked whether to start with a physical board for the team and use KaiNexus only for tracking and sharing, or do everything in KaiNexus. Greg's answer was the medical "appendicitis presents a hundred different ways" version: there is no single right answer. Different work environments, different access to computers and smartphones, different team distributions all change the calculus. What is wrong is the absolutist position in either direction, that technology has no role in improvement work, or that paper and boards should be scrapped on day one. The right framing is to ask what problem you are solving and what reduces friction for the people doing the work. Some organizations use KaiNexus mainly to track, others use it as the primary place the work happens. The right mindset is technology as accelerator. The wrong mindset is technology as silver bullet.
Mark added the case for digital where it matters most: visibility across distance and time. Bulletin boards can work fine inside a single team in a single location. They cannot solve the visibility problem for an organization with multiple sites across a region, a country, or the world. For spreading and sharing improvement and for remote collaboration, the digital solution is not a nice-to-have. It is the problem the technology was built for.
An attendee asked whether improvement needs to be mandatory, with a goal for how many projects each person should be involved in. Mark started by rewording the question. Do not call them projects. The word "project" sounds big and triggers exactly the resistance the rest of the episode was about. Call them improvements. Then his answer: organizations with and without goals have all succeeded with continuous improvement. Some use aspirational goals (we would like two improvements per person per year), some use targets or quotas, some use no goals at all. The variable that actually drives improvement activity is not the quota. It is leadership behavior. The spirit of continuous improvement is self-motivated, because the work is easier, the patients are better served, the organization is healthier. Daniel Pink's "Drive" breaks down the behavioral science underneath this.
Greg was firmer. There are workplaces where quotas are the right way to motivate, but continuous improvement is not one of them. A quota of one or two improvements per month produces volume, and volume of junk. KaiNexus has worked with organizations that dropped a quota in favor of intrinsic motivation and got fewer improvements with much larger impact. He recommended rewarding accomplishment instead, with badges, recognition, or small tokens. Mark added a point worth holding onto. A target sometimes becomes a ceiling. If the goal is four ideas a year, people stop at four and hold the rest in reserve in case next year's number goes up. That is the opposite of what anyone setting a target intends.
The closing question was KaiNexus-specific. For a large organization, how does access work, and can the system connect to other systems? Greg used the question to lay out the model KaiNexus thinks in. The work of building a culture of continuous improvement sits in a few buckets: daily frontline improvement (bottom-up), larger top-down project work, the alignment that keeps top-down and bottom-up moving the same direction, the data underneath, and ongoing coaching and problem-solving skill development. Which of those an organization is investing in determines how access should work. If the goal is frontline daily improvement, give everyone access. You cannot ask someone to play football and forbid them from touching the ball. If the focus is training and certification, give access to the people in that work. Giving access without the structure and purpose underneath it is its own route to failure.
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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