Two Questions Kim Barnas Wanted Every Leader to Ask

The continuous improvement community lost Kim Barnas earlier this year. She passed away on January 3, 2026, after several years of...

Most People Aren't Resisting Change. They're at a Different Stage of It.

The standard story about why improvement initiatives fail goes like this. The team designs the change. The team plans the rollout. The team...

Why Improvements Don't Stick: It's Not Backsliding, It's a Failed Handoff

Every continuous improvement professional has heard some version of the same complaint.

"We ran a great kaizen event. We came back ninety...

Talent Gets You in the Room. A Growth Mindset Decides the Rest.

Last season, my team missed the NBA playoffs. Again. The San Antonio Spurs landed in the lottery. And going into this year, most people had...

Don't Launch to Everyone at Once: The Case for Piloting Change with Willing Adopters

Lynn Kelley had rolled out big organizational changes across 32 countries at Textron. She'd worked with Bell Helicopter, Cessna Aircraft,...

Why Improvement Programs Stall -- and the Leadership Behaviors That Restart Them

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Most CI and operational excellence leaders have lived this. The strategy is sound. The methodology is in place. People have...

"We're the Kind of Organization That...": Why Identity Beats KPI Targets for Sustaining Improvement

There's a phrase that Greg Jacobson, CEO of KaiNexus, uses that sounds like a minor word choice but functions as a completely different...

Are You Solving the Right Problem? The Most Common (and Costly) Mistake in Continuous Improvement

Every improvement program has a version of this story. Someone identifies a change they want to make. They build the business case, get...

How to Design Habit Loops for 5 Continuous Improvement Behaviors

This is a companion piece to our earlier post on how habit science can build a culture of continuous improvement. That post covers the...