If Your People Have to Be Heroes, Look at the System

Steve Spear, senior lecturer at MIT Sloan, founder of See to Solve, and author of The High-Velocity Edge and, with Gene Kim, Wiring the Winning Organization, opened his keynote at the AME 2026 International Conference in Milwaukee by asking for a show of hands. First, he asked whether our work, when it goes well, adds value to someone else's life. Hands went up across the room.

Then he asked us to keep our hands up if this was also true: the systems we work in, despite how much intelligence our work requires, too often make us feel as if they think we're stupid. A lot of hands stayed up.

Karen Martin, founder of TKMG and TKMG Academy and author of The Outstanding Organization, came at the same problem from a different direction in her keynote. Her topic was Respect for People, and her argument was that the disrespect that matters most in organizations usually isn't loud. It isn't yelling or rudeness. It's quiet, and it's built into how the work is set up.

The two keynotes had different vocabularies, but they shared a pattern. Each speaker told a story about a senior leader who learned, by going to see the work, that their people were compensating every day for a system nobody had fixed.

A VP who found out her people were heroes

Karen described a financial services company where her team was introducing Lean across a global customer operations group. One of seven VPs, Lauren, took an interest in gemba walks. As Karen told it, several of the other VPs rolled their eyes at yet another new initiative.

Lauren wanted to do her first walk on her own. She and Karen prepared together, working out which questions to ask and how to ask them, and then Lauren went by herself.

When Lauren called afterward, Karen could tell something had happened. Lauren said it had been really hard. She had no idea what her people had to put up with. They were heroes, she said, working extremely hard because the company's systems forced them to do a ton of rework.

Lauren didn't stop at feeling bad about it. Karen said Lauren was able to shift some budget, and the team made changes to the technology that removed much of the rework.

An executive who stopped trusting the dashboards

Steve told a parallel story from his work with the U.S. Navy, which he said goes back at least a decade.

A senior executive was getting a steady stream of reports, metrics and dashboards, some of them built by an expensive consulting firm. None of it told him what was actually going on. So he went to the shop floor to see.

He found machinists, technicians and engineers fighting obstacles just to get anything done. Many of those obstacles weren't technical. They were administrative: rules and processes that determined what people were allowed to do and what they were required to do. Steve's point was that the executive had the authority to change those processes. He could help rewire them, and he did.

Steve described the yard going from late on nearly every job to delivering work early.

Steve describes this as the leader's job: maintaining the organization's "social circuitry." Engineers are responsible for the technical systems. Leaders are responsible for how people's knowledge and effort connect so that individual work adds up to collective results. When that wiring is poor, people stop focusing on the problem in front of them and start figuring out how to get anything through the system at all.

Why heroics hide the problem

This next part is my take, not something either speaker said.

Heroics are easy to praise and hard to see as a warning. In healthcare, I've seen plenty of organizations celebrate the nurse who found a way around the broken process. Without realizing it, they're celebrating the fact that the process is still broken. The workaround succeeds, the patient is fine, and the problem never shows up in a report.

That's why both leaders had to go look. Lauren's people weren't failing, and the shipyard's workers weren't idle. The reports likely looked tolerable because people were absorbing the system's problems through extra effort. The cost showed up as frustration, rework and burnout, the things dashboards rarely capture.

Karen offered a useful reminder about the word itself. "Respect" comes from Latin roots meaning to look again. Both of these leaders did exactly that.

Where respect is built or lost

Karen opened her talk with a smaller story. A new field technician named Gary interrupted a team meeting to suggest putting uniforms on a supply checklist. He'd gone two weeks without a uniform while his experienced peers wore pressed ones in front of customers. He felt unprofessional, and he wondered whether he was really part of the team. Nobody intended that. The onboarding process just didn't account for it.

Karen organized her talk around four conditions that make respect real in daily operations: belonging, competence, enabling conditions, and development and agency. The first two describe how people experience their work. The second two describe what the organization does to make good work possible.

Lauren's story is about enabling conditions. Her team didn't lack skill or commitment. They lacked a system that let their skill show up as results instead of rework. Gary's story is about belonging, and it was undermined on day one by something as ordinary as a supply process.

Neither story involved a bad manager. Karen described this kind of disrespect as silent, and that silence is what makes it so persistent. Nobody decides to make people's work harder. The problems pile up one process at a time.

Steve's homework

Steve closed with homework for leaders, and it's worth repeating here in paraphrase:

• Go to where the work happens and watch where people's attention goes. Is it on the work and the people they serve, or on navigating the system?
• When a problem comes up, how quickly is it seen and solved, and where?
• How small is a problem when someone first notices it, and how long does it take to get attention?
• Decide where you'll go first. In his view, it doesn't much matter where. What changes is how you see.

Karen's advice for starting was similar in spirit: pick one thing, then one more, then one more.

If Lauren's story made you want to hear more from Karen, she spent a full hour answering questions from KaiNexus viewers in our Ask the Expert webinar earlier this year. She talked about how gemba walks can slide into "gemba theater," why she says she was once a terrible boss, and why a CI team's job is teaching, not doing. Watch the Ask Karen Martin Anything recording, or read our highlights from the session.

For more on going to see the work, see Gemba Walks: What Leaders Get Wrong and How to Fix It.

Seeing problems before people have to be heroes

A note from KaiNexus, since this is our blog: neither keynote was about our software.

A gemba walk shows a leader what's happening in one place on one day. In a large organization, leaders also need a way to see problems between walks, while they're still small, and to know whether anything happened after someone raised one. That's the kind of visibility KaiNexus was built to provide. If you're trying to shorten the time between a problem appearing and someone acting on it, see KaiNexus in action.