KaiNexus CEO and co-founder Greg Jacobson joins host Mark Graban for the twenty-seventh episode of the Ask Us Anything series, the recurring session built around questions from webinar attendees. The questions in this batch keep returning to a single uncomfortable truth: continuous improvement is not a thing you finish. One reader wants to know how to convince management that Lean is a long-term methodology rather than a project. Another asks what new tools are gaining momentum. A third asks how to measure success in terms of the customer rather than the business. Running underneath all of it is a story Greg tells about an organization that had just dissolved its continuous improvement department on the logic that, two years in, everyone had been trained and the work was done. That logic is exactly the misconception the episode exists to correct.
Here is what the episode covers and the thinking behind each answer.
A reader asked how to convince management that implementing Lean is a long-term methodology. Mark started with the source. The first of the 14 principles in Jeff Liker's "The Toyota Way," developed with Toyota, is to base decisions on the long term even at the expense of short-term results. It's principle number one for a reason, and the failure to embrace it is one of the biggest causes of Lean failing to take root. The way to convince management of it is to share the philosophy, not just the tools, and ideally to help them discover it for themselves, sometimes by introducing them to other executives who already hold the belief.
Greg's framing was the one that runs through the whole episode. Asking whether you can implement Lean once and be done is like asking whether you can work out hard one time and be fit for the rest of your life. Nobody believes the fitness version, yet organizations believe the Lean version constantly. Thirty minutes a few times a week beats 24 hours of exercise all at once, and continuous improvement works the same way. It's a lifestyle, not an event. He came back to Seth Godin's definition of culture, people like us do things like this, because that's what CI experts are really doing: getting people to do things like this, continuously.
Then came the story. The day before recording, an organization had told KaiNexus it was dissolving its continuous improvement department, on the reasoning that after two years everyone had been trained and was now doing the work, so the department was no longer needed. Fifteen years ago, Greg said, he might have accepted that logic, because everyone doing improvement is close to the definition of success. But after working with hundreds of organizations and speaking with thousands, he cannot identify a single successful one that does not have at least one full-time person thinking about continuous improvement. The ratio might be one expert per few hundred or per few thousand people, but it is never zero. His analogy: a professional tennis player still has a coach, often one of the best coaches. The expert's job is not to do the improvement work for everyone. It's to coach, train, and keep the standards. Ripping that role out to cut costs is a serious error of reasoning.
Mark agreed and added the corroborating evidence. Even Toyota still has a central TPS group and a TQM group in Japan. The intent isn't to do the work but to serve as master coaches, trainers, and keepers of the standard. He's heard manufacturers and hospitals say "this is just how we do things now," and sometimes that's true, but the proof is in the pudding. He'd want to see those Lean specialists redeployed as leaders rather than cut, and he's skeptical when "this is just how we do things now" turns out to be cost-cutting in disguise.
Mark closed the segment on the fad question. Lean is only a fad in organizations susceptible to fads, the same ones that adopt whatever hot diet is going and then conclude it didn't work, just like the last ten. At some point the move is to stop bolting on methodologies and look for the root causes of low organizational performance. He was honest about the limit, too. If someone is already convinced Lean is just short-term tools and cost-cutting, you probably cannot convince them otherwise. You can introduce most people to the long-term idea, but you cannot force the belief.
A reader asked what recent tools or systems of continuous improvement are gathering momentum, primarily in manufacturing. Greg's first answer was the recognition that paper and bulletin boards, useful as they are for some things, do not support collaboration when people are distributed across space and time, and they break down at the scale of a thousand or fifty thousand people across factories on multiple continents. The resistance to using technology for this work has dropped sharply even in the few years he'd been back in Ohio talking to people about it. The question now is how technology can add value without getting in the way. He named KaiNexus as his biased pick, earned by ten years of running the same PDSA cycle on customer feedback.
Mark added a methodology rather than a system: Toyota Kata, from Mike Rother's book published in mid-2009. He was candid about his own arc with it. His first impression was skeptical, he already knew Kaizen and PDSA, so did he really need another word and another method? Giving it more of a chance, he came around. Toyota Kata adds a helpful framework in a couple of ways: it makes coaching others through their problem solving more intentional, rather than the coach being the problem solver, and it gives a structured, incremental, experimental way to get from a current condition to a target condition through many small steps rather than a moon shot. He doesn't claim to be a deep practitioner, but he's come to see it adds genuine perspective and tactics. Greg connected it to the broader family of frameworks that help the brain reach better outcomes, A3, PDSA, even the history-of-present-illness process a physician runs through, where the structure becomes ingrained and produces a better differential and a better plan by the end.
A reader named Thomas asked how KaiNexus measures success with customers, specifically a voice-of-the-customer metric rather than a voice-of-the-business metric like accounts or sales. Greg's single aligning metric for the past three or four years is the number of completed items in the platform. It came from Jim Collins's "Good to Great" and the concept of a BHAG, a big hairy audacious goal, which is typically not a financial metric but represents genuine goodness in how customers are using the product. KaiNexus has tried to double its all-time total of completed improvements each year, which gets harder as the numbers grow. They went from about 100,000 to roughly 180,000 or 190,000 the prior year and were aiming for about 330,000.
Beyond the BHAG, Greg laid out the three categories KaiNexus uses, which apply to any organization whether or not they use the platform. Activity: the number of submitted and completed items, small bottom-up improvements or larger top-down projects. Engagement: how often people actually use the system and submit things, deliberately distinguished from activity, because a hundred items from five people is a very different culture than a hundred items from ninety people. Impact: not just financial (revenue, cost savings, time savings) but also patient or customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, and even environmental and health impact for some customers. Together that's a broad, honest way to think about the voice of the customer.
Mark connected the philosophy to healthcare's payment problem. The company has worked to align its own success with its customers' success. Healthcare is still struggling to align incentives around keeping patients healthy and out of expensive treatment, because in many prior payment models, the more a patient engages with the system, the better the system does financially, even though heavy engagement often means the patient is sicker. Experiments in paying for outcomes rather than activity have run for decades and remain hard. If it were easy to fix, it would have been fixed already, but the direction, toward outcomes and toward time, is the right one.
The conversation turned to how easily any metric can be distorted, prompted by Greg mentioning a health plan that pays a few dollars a day for hitting walking targets. Mark offered the origin of the 10,000-step figure, a story he believes is true: a Japanese pedometer manufacturer was first to make a device that could display five digits, and 10,000 is the lowest five-digit number, so the round figure got promoted partly as a way to sell the better pedometer. The point is that what's easily measurable is not always what's meaningful. Ten thousand steps at a brisk pace around a track is not the same as ten thousand steps in short strolls where the heart rate never rises.
The same risk applies to CI metrics. Organizations might count A3s initiated, A3s completed, or Kaizen improvements done, and use KaiNexus to tabulate them, but the work has to guard against the dysfunction of people churning out A3s to hit a quota. A good A3 has rigorous root cause analysis, input from the right people, and countermeasures that are actually tested and evaluated, not just "we implemented it, we're done." Any system or measure can be distorted into a bad place. Mark named two specific failure modes from the research: a goal often becomes a ceiling (you hit 10,000 steps and stop moving), and fitness trackers don't always produce weight loss because people grant themselves permission to eat more after exercising, sometimes counteracting the effect entirely. People are complicated.
Greg closed with a book recommendation, "Great Leaders Have No Rules," and its argument that policies and rules tend to create dysfunctional behavior, while guidelines let people understand the spirit of why something exists and adhere to it in the way that helps most. Thirty minutes, he noted, has always been more of a guideline than a rule for these sessions.
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.
See KaiNexus in action and see how KaiNexus helps organizations capture ideas, coach improvement, and connect daily work to strategy.
.svg)
Copyright © 2026
Privacy Policy