KaiNexus CEO and co-founder Greg Jacobson joins host Mark Graban for the twenty-second episode of the Ask Us Anything series, the recurring session built around questions from webinar attendees. This batch sits squarely in the harder middle stretch of a continuous improvement program. The questions come from people who have been doing this work for a while: a CI leader watching engagement dwindle as the company grows, a practitioner whose Kaizen event changes never seem to stick, a leader trying to maintain a leadership development program that keeps surfacing new hurdles. None of these are first-week problems. They are the kind of questions that surface after a program has been running long enough to develop its own pathologies.
Here is what the episode covers and the thinking behind each answer.
A reader asked which processes the hosts would most like to see improved at client companies. Mark led with safety. Employee safety in any setting, ergonomics in healthcare, patient safety, and then, after that, the principle Taiichi Ohno gave practitioners: start from need. Every organization has its own most pressing needs, and those needs should point to the processes worth improving.
Greg turned the question on its head. He shares the safety instinct, but what excites him most now is the breadth of improvement work he sees across the KaiNexus customer base. The company started in healthcare; healthcare now accounts for somewhere between thirty and forty percent of customers. The improvements that fire him up most are the ones obviously coming from a frontline worker, the ones leadership would never have thought of, the ones that would have been ignored in a less responsive system. Two flavors get him excited. The first is "why are we even doing this," the discovery that an activity adds no value and exists only because nobody questioned it. The second is the small tweak that unlocks a disproportionate amount of value, the dam that opens.
Asked what questions come up most often from prospective KaiNexus customers, Greg looked past the tactical questions and named the underlying frustration he hears in many of them. CI and PI leaders are usually trying to figure out how to engage more people, and how to convince their organizations that continuous improvement is strategically critical. There is no single answer that fits every company's situation. Start with why, engage your leaders, build leader standard work, all of these matter, but if there were one universal answer that worked everywhere, building a culture of continuous improvement would not be hard. Mark added that the questions he is asked most through Ask Us Anything itself follow the same pattern. The questions are not tactical. They are about culture, leadership behaviors, and how to create the conditions where improvement actually happens.
A reader asked what role training and certifications should play in Lean. Mark separated the two. Training and knowledge matter; books, webinars, classes, and other formal learning all have a place. But the most important thing in Lean is learning by doing. He likes the phrase "practicing Lean," because it captures the reality. You practice. You get better over time. You make mistakes, hopefully small ones, and you learn from them. A coach or qualified mentor accelerates this enormously. On certification, Lean does not really share the Six Sigma tradition of color-coded belts. Toyota employees can spend a full career inside the company, get certified in specific Toyota methods, and never receive a hierarchical color or ranking. High certification with little experience and high experience with no formal credential both exist, and both are common.
Greg's expansion centered on how adults actually learn. Three months or six months of training followed by an expectation of expertise is roughly the wrong model. He compared it to how medical school has evolved. Twenty years ago, lectures were organized around topics; today, much more of the teaching is built around patient cases, where two or three minutes of conceptual knowledge gets delivered inside a real situation. The retention is dramatically better, because the knowledge lands in context. The same logic applies to Lean. Teach as little as possible up front to get someone doing improvement, then layer on specific tools (a 5 Whys, a fishbone) at the moment they actually have an application for them.
Mark connected this to MIT's evolution of its own quality teaching, where the model is learn-do-learn-do in small batches, and to the medical education shorthand: see one, do one, teach one. The cleanest summary is Ohno's again. Start from need. When you have a need, learn something and apply it. Long upfront training and extensive certification before doing anything is the slower path, not the faster one.
A reader named Blake asked how to maintain a robust leadership development program when every solution seems to bring another hurdle. Mark's answer was that this is the normal shape of the work. Every change either exposes a new problem or introduces a side effect somewhere else. Do not interpret hurdles as evidence that you are failing. Greg added the staircase image. A PDSA cycle is not a straight climb. It is up, sideways, slightly down, up again. Entropy is part of any system; every improvement requires energy to sustain, and new energy to spark the next phase. A new approach that feels necessary now does not mean the previous approach failed. It worked for the part of the journey it was designed for.
A reader named Brian wrote in with a familiar observation: his favorite part of Lean is Kaizen events and the improvements that come from them, but in most organizations a lack of sustainment occurs. What can be done?
Mark used the question to push on the framing. When he gets brought into organizations to diagnose what is going wrong, a lot of what gets described as "lack of sustainment" turns out to be something else. The pattern is familiar. A Kaizen event develops a new method, the team tests it during the week, and then the new process gets handed off poorly to the people who actually run the work every day. The team comes back ninety days later, sees the old behavior, and calls it backsliding. In many cases the change was never actually adopted to begin with. That is a different problem from sustainment, and the countermeasure is different too. Improve the handoff. Make sure the people who will run the new process every day are the people who developed it. Avoid the pattern of outside experts swarming in to "fix it for you," then leaving.
Greg added the discipline that holds at KaiNexus internally. When the team agrees to change a process, the very next time the process comes up, someone has to be willing to say, in a non-punishing way, "wait, I thought we agreed we were going to do this differently." Breaking an old habit and starting a new one takes deliberate, repeated correction in the moment. Greg called himself the agitator in this role, in a positive sense, the one who slows the team down to ask whether they are about to revert to the old comfortable model. People being told what the new process is will adopt it at a much lower rate than people who built the new process themselves, and even people who built it will catch themselves slipping back.
Mark expanded this with how to ask the question. If it appears people are not following standardized work, ask "why" in different ways, not in a way that breeds defensiveness. Help me understand. I thought we agreed we'd do this. Are there legitimate barriers you are running into that we should fix? This is part of a PDSA cycle. And there is a real distinction worth holding between "I cannot do it that way" and "I will not." Cannot means barriers, and barriers can be removed. Will not means a choice, which requires coaching, not authority. The authoritarian "do it because I'm the boss" path just teaches people to get better at hiding how they're actually doing the work.
A reader named Luke wrote in with a layered question. He had taken over a CI program that had been running for ten years, with dwindling engagement as the company grew, decent participation in some departments, and outright resistance in office departments. The program had drifted into being effectively an IT request system, with such tight financial filters that even small ideas had to prove their dollar value before implementation. He was planning a company-wide survey to understand the current state, and asked what questions to include, plus what fresh approaches other companies are using.
Mark questioned the survey instinct first. Surveys produce shallow data; face-to-face conversations produce useful data. It sounded like Luke was already doing both. The pattern he described, resistance from office departments, drift into an IT request system, a financially-focused screen, points to a clear countermeasure. Reinvigorate by going back to basics. Engage people with small ideas. Fix what bugs you. Fix things related to safety and quality where putting a dollar figure on the value is genuinely difficult. Let people implement a lot of improvements that do not have eye-popping ROI, because that is how a participation culture rebuilds. The big results follow the participation, not the other way around.
Greg's read was different and worth keeping. When the program shrinks into something that looks like an IT request system over ten years, the most likely cause is a dilution of the people emphasizing the why. At ten employees, one person beating the drum is enough. At a hundred, you need ten coaches. At a thousand, you need a hundred. If the absolute number of people holding the why has not scaled with the company, the program degrades by telephone game until it becomes something almost unrecognizable. The fix is leadership investment in re-explaining and re-energizing the why, especially given the turnover that accumulates over a decade and the awareness gaps that produces. Some people in the organization have never been part of the conversation about why the program exists.
On freshness, Greg has seen the "workout" pattern reinvigorate programs effectively. A 90-day push with a specific theme, safety, finance, satisfaction, gives the organization a reason to circle the wagons and gets attention back on the work. Programs that never change shape tend to settle into comfort and lose their charge. A periodic re-theming shakes things up before staleness sets in.
Mark closed with a useful idea on the survey question. Borrow two questions from motivational interviewing. On a scale of one to ten, how committed are you to continuous improvement in your area? On the same scale, how confident are you in your ability to participate? Then ask the follow-up: if you said a six, why did you say six instead of a one? That phrasing gets people articulating what is positive about their situation, not just enumerating barriers. The instinct to focus on barriers feels like problem-solving, but the psychology research suggests that dwelling on the negative reinforces the negative. Build on what is working rather than only excavating what is not.
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.
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