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...

What "Respect for People" Actually Looks Like on a Tuesday Morning

Every Lean practitioner can recite the two pillars: continuous improvement and respect for people. Ask them what continuous improvement...

Your Employees' Ideas Aren't Disappearing -- They're Being Ignored by Your System

One operations director, describing what happened to frontline ideas at his organization before they overhauled their approach, put it...