KaiNexus Blog

Using AI for Continuous Improvement of a Website | KaiNexus

mark@kainexus.com (Mark Graban) — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 01:23:28 GMT

One defunct podcast host left 70 broken audio players across the KaiNexus website. The obvious and known fix was to replace them one at a time. I wanted to see whether AI could help me do it faster without creating a larger mess. And to avoid a lot of drudgery.

Lean Audit for Your Continuous Improvement Program

Linda Vicaro — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 10:30:00 GMT

If you lead continuous improvement, you spend your days coaching other teams through Lean thinking. Standardize the process. Make the work visible. Find the bottleneck. Respect people's time. Ask most CI leaders when they last pointed that same discipline at their own CI program, whatever it happens to run on, and you'll get a long pause.

The Certainty Trap: Why Feeling Sure Is the Warning Sign

jeff.roussel@kainexus.com (Jeff Roussel) — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 08:30:01 GMT

There's a feeling that arrives when you've finished analyzing a problem and arrived at the answer. It feels like clarity. It feels like having done the work. It feels like being right.

How CI Leaders Can Make a Stronger Case for Funding

mark@kainexus.com (Mark Graban) — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 18:20:16 GMT

Why can a strong, and capable, continuous improvement program still struggle to secure or maintain funding?

That is the question Jeff Roussel, Chief Revenue Officer at KaiNexus, will address in our upcoming webinar, “Why Great CI Programs Don’t Get Funded—and What to Do About It.”

Why "Just Show Them the Data" Doesn't Change Minds

greg@kainexus.com (Greg Jacobson) — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 09:45:00 GMT

You walk into the meeting prepared. The data is clean. The metrics are clear. The cost of doing nothing is documented. The proposed change has a strong return, a reasonable timeline, and a defensible plan.

And then it goes sideways.

The ICU Had a High-Performing Team. That Wasn't Enough.

Emily Kauten — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 19:26:21 GMT

When a nurse comes to Jackie with an idea, her response is always the same: "Did you put that in KaiNexus?"

That's it. No form to fill out. No meeting to schedule. No waiting to see if it goes anywhere. Just a question that tells staff exactly what's expected and gives Jackie the visibility to make sure the idea doesn't die.

From a Day a Week to an Hour: The Kaizen Coaching Shift

mark@kainexus.com (Mark Graban) — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 11:00:00 GMT

A new manager went to Joe Swartz, then Director of Business Transformation at Franciscan St. Francis Health, with a problem. Kaizen was taking her about a day a week. Was that normal?

Why Effective A3 Authors Need Permission to Fail

mark@kainexus.com (Mark Graban) — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 09:15:01 GMT

Taiichi Ohno was famously direct about experimentation. The story most people know is the one where he drew a chalk circle on the factory floor and made supervisors stand inside it for hours, watching the work until they could see waste they hadn't noticed before. The story that gets told less often is what he expected those supervisors to do once they saw the waste. He expected them to try things. He expected some of those tries to fail. He expected them to try again with what they had learned.

The CI Problems You Think Are Unique to Your Industry Probably Aren't

maggie.millard@kainexus.com (Maggie Millard) — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 18:40:50 GMT

CI programs are usually built within the walls of a single organization. You benchmark against your own history and learn from your own mistakes. You rarely get to sit across from someone in a completely different industry and ask, "Are you dealing with this too?"

When Strategy Lives in PowerPoint, Nothing Aligns

Emily Kauten — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 10:15:01 GMT

Most organizations have a strategic plan. Most also have the experience of watching that plan fragment as it moves downstream. Priorities stall. Initiatives compete for the same resources. Different parts of the organization work on the same problem in parallel without knowing it. Accountability fades as the distance from the executive review grows. The plan everyone agreed to in November becomes unrecognizable by March.