Ten years of answering questions from CI practitioners taught us that the hardest problems aren't technical -- they're human. Leadership resistance, sustainment, participation, and trust keep coming up because they're genuinely hard. Here's what we've learned.
When we recorded the first Ask Us Anything webinar, we had no idea we were starting a series. We just had more questions than one session could handle -- and it turned out, so did our community.
What began as a backlog-clearing experiment became 30-plus episodes, hundreds of questions, and one of the most honest conversations we know of about what it actually takes to build a culture of continuous improvement. Not the theory. The real thing -- the resistance, the setbacks, the leadership failures, and the moments where it finally clicked.
We recently went back through the full series. Some of what we discussed was specific to a moment in time. But a surprising amount of it is as relevant now as the day we recorded it. Here are the questions and insights that have stayed with us.
This post is the first in a series. Each of the themes below will get its own deeper treatment -- with more context, more examples, and more of what we've learned from working with hundreds of organizations since those early episodes. We'll link each post here as it publishes. If you don't want to miss them, subscribe to the KaiNexus blog.
This question showed up early and never really went away. It came in different forms -- about physicians, about executives, about engineers who considered improvement work beneath them -- but the underlying dynamic was always the same.
Our answer evolved over time, but the core of it held: you can't convince someone to change by telling them to change. You have to start with their goals, their frustrations, their language. Find the problem they already care about. Then show them that improvement science is simply a better way to solve it.
What we said in one early episode still stands: don't even say the word "lean" if you don't have to. Talk about the problem. Let the methodology follow.
The other piece that kept coming up is what happens when leaders are brought in as observers rather than participants. Doctors who weren't at the improvement table. Managers whose departments were being "improved" without their involvement. That's not lean -- that's change being done to people, and the resistance it generates is completely rational.
Respect for people isn't a soft add-on to lean. It's load-bearing.
Support is passive. Commitment means showing up, dedicating resources, and being willing to change your own behavior -- not just asking others to change theirs.
The shift usually happens when leaders make a genuine connection between CI and the outcomes they're accountable for. Not "lean is good" in the abstract, but "if we don't get turnover under control, we are in serious trouble -- and the research is clear that engaged employees who have a voice in improving their work stay longer."
What we found in practice: organizations where the CEO described themselves as the chief continuous improvement officer -- even informally -- had a fundamentally different energy than organizations where CI lived two or three levels down the org chart and reported to the director of quality.
Where CI sits in the structure sends a signal. A VP of Continuous Improvement reporting to the COO says this is strategic. A coordinator buried in the quality department says this is compliance.
This question seems tactical but it points to something important. The term "Kaizen blitz" came from early Japanese consultants who wanted to demonstrate continuous improvement in a compressed, visible format. A week-long event, a big team, a dramatic before-and-after.
The problem is that organizations adopted the format and mistook it for the whole practice. If your CI program consists entirely of scheduled improvement events, you are doing episodic improvement -- not continuous improvement. There is a time and a place for rapid improvement events. But if there's no daily improvement happening in between, the culture never really takes hold.
The analogy we kept coming back to: you can't get fit by going to the gym one week every quarter. The event is useful. The daily practice is what actually changes you.
The best organizations we've worked with do both. The events handle complex, systemic problems that require a dedicated team. Daily Kaizen handles everything else -- which is most of the improvement potential in any organization.
Shingo said something worth repeating: roughly 90% of resistance is cautionary. People who push back on a change are usually telling you something -- that they weren't involved in the design, that they've seen this before and it didn't work, that they're worried about something you haven't addressed yet.
Treating all resistance as obstruction is a mistake. It shuts down the very feedback loop you need to improve the change itself.
What we consistently recommended: listen first. Understand the specific objection. Most of the time, the person resisting has information you don't have. And the act of being genuinely heard is often enough to move someone from crossed arms to cautious participation.
There's also a useful reframe here. Culture change doesn't happen before improvement starts -- it happens because of it. You don't build a culture of improvement and then start improving. You start improving, people see that their ideas are heard and acted on, and over time that becomes the culture.
This one generated real debate across multiple episodes. The short answer we kept landing on: mandatory participation produces compliance, not improvement.
When organizations set quotas -- every employee must submit two ideas per year -- what they tend to get is a surge of low-quality submissions at year-end from people trying to hit a number. Organizations that dropped those quotas consistently reported that the quality of ideas went up, even if the volume went down.
Daniel Pink's research on intrinsic motivation is directly relevant here. People who improve because they want to -- because they see the problem, believe their idea will be heard, and feel ownership over the solution -- are doing something fundamentally different from people who submit an idea because their manager reminded them it's Q4.
The goal is to create conditions where people want to participate. That means responding to ideas quickly, implementing what you can, explaining what you can't and why, and making sure credit lands with the person who brought the idea forward.
This question came up in almost every episode, and we kept refining our answer.
The most important reframe: what looks like a sustainment problem is usually an adoption problem. When organizations say "we implemented lean and then it fell apart," what often happened is that the changes were never fully implemented to begin with. People were trained but not coached. Processes were redesigned but the new standard work was never reinforced. Leaders attended the kickoff but didn't change their daily routines.
Sustainment requires continuous energy input. Entropy is real. Left alone, systems drift back toward their previous state. That's not a failure of lean -- it's just physics.
What keeps CI alive over time: leader standard work that makes improvement a daily habit, not an annual initiative; huddles that create a regular cadence for surfacing and solving problems; and technology that gives everyone visibility into what's being worked on, what's been implemented, and what impact it's had.
The organizations that sustain CI longest are the ones where it stops being a program and becomes the way work gets managed.
We debated this across many episodes. Surveys have their place. Turnover and absenteeism tell you something. But if we had to pick one number, it's this: implemented improvements per person per year.
Not submitted ideas -- implemented improvements. That single metric tells you whether people are participating, whether their ideas are being acted on, and whether the system is functioning as designed.
Organizations below one implemented improvement per person per year are typically in early stages or have a broken feedback loop. Organizations consistently above ten are doing something most have never seen.
The other dimension that matters is breadth of participation. One hundred improvements completed by five people is a very different organization than one hundred improvements completed by eighty people. The second organization is more resilient, more engaged, and has a CI culture that doesn't collapse when a key person leaves.
No. And the fact that leaders ask this question the way they do -- framing it as an employee problem -- is usually a sign that something upstream went wrong.
When staff don't participate in improvement, the question worth asking is: what has leadership done, intentionally or not, to discourage people from speaking up? Have ideas been submitted and ignored? Have people been blamed when they pointed out problems? Has improvement work been positioned as something done to people rather than with them?
Ethan Burris at UT Austin found something striking in his research: asking for ideas and then not responding to them produces more disengagement than never asking at all. The act of soliciting input and then going silent is actively damaging to trust.
If you're not getting participation, don't start with the staff. Start with the system.
We recorded the first Ask Us Anything in 2015. A lot has changed since then -- in healthcare, in technology, in how organizations think about employee engagement and psychological safety.
But the core questions haven't changed. How do you get leaders to change their behavior? How do you create an environment where people feel safe speaking up? How do you sustain improvement over time? How do you measure whether a culture is actually healthy or just performing health?
Those questions are as live today as they were ten years ago. We don't think that's discouraging. We think it means the work matters.
Each of the questions above will get its own post -- more depth, more examples, more of what we've learned since those early recordings. Here's what's coming:
Subscribe to the KaiNexus blog to get each post as it publishes.
In the meantime, the full Ask Us Anything series is available on YouTube -- 30-plus episodes covering these topics and many more, in Mark and Greg's own words.