If Your People Have to Be Heroes, Look at the System
November 12, 2026Steve Spear, senior lecturer at MIT Sloan, founder of See to Solve, and author of The High-Velocity Edge and, with Gene Kim, Wiring the...
Don't Wait for Employees to Speak Up. Ask Them.
November 2, 2026A vice president I was coaching went with me to an emergency department to learn more about the work and the problems employees were...
Why "Just Show Them the Data" Almost Never Works
July 13, 2026You walk into the meeting prepared. The data is clean. The metrics are clear. The cost of doing nothing is documented. The proposed change...
The Manager Who Got Kaizen Down from a Day a Week to an Hour a Week
July 6, 2026A new manager went to Joe Swartz, then Director of Business Transformation at Franciscan St. Francis Health, with a problem. Kaizen was...
Two Questions Kim Barnas Wanted Every Leader to Ask
June 22, 2026The 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.
June 15, 2026The 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
June 5, 2026Every 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.
June 3, 2026Last 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
May 21, 2026Lynn Kelley had rolled out big organizational changes across 32 countries at Textron. She'd worked with Bell Helicopter, Cessna Aircraft,...
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