Kainexus Continuous Improvement Podcast

The beginning of summer must be a good time for Kaizen events because we have been getting a lot of questions about them lately. We thought we would take a few minutes to answer the ones we hear most often.

Taiichi Ohno also said that Kaizen is about changing the way things are. If you assume that things are all right the way they are, you cannot do Kaizen. So, change something. Yes, there is some effort and time involved in implementing Standard Work, but the upside is enormous. If you are not using it, that may be the most important thing to change.

Whether you are new to huddle boards or have decided it’s time to move yours from the wall into the cloud, we offer you congratulations. Digital huddle boards are an excellent way to organize and track improvement projects. They have the potential to increase the number of completed improvements and to help you prove how valuable this effort is to the organization.

Whenever I read a book, I try to apply myself to the situations discussed. How does this affect my personal life? How can I apply what I learned to my work at KaiNexus? Oftentimes, this can be difficult depending on the subject. The Devil In The White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by Erik Larsen may not be as applicable to me as Start With Why by Simon Sinek (but both are highly recommended!). Reading the behind the scenes of Game 7 of the World Series and hearing about some of the lesser-known details of his career made for a pretty fascinating read. However, the passage at the top of page 231 struck a chord with me.

Gemba walks are an increasingly popular management technique. By visiting the place where work is done, leaders gain valuable insight into the flow of value through the organization and often uncover opportunities for improvement and learn new ways to support employees. The approach is a collaborative one, with employees providing details about what is done and why. Great results depend on thoughtful planning, execution, and follow-up. Here are the most important steps you can take to ensure that your next Gemba walk is successful.

Giving staff members a larger voice and the ability to solve their own problems increases productivity, increases the sense of responsibility in the organization, and increases their satisfaction in daily tasks. Giving team members a stake in how their work also increases the intrinsic motivation that organizations look for in culture of improvement or collective responsibility.

Whether you work in healthcare, politics, construction, or really just about any industry, providing Service Excellence is particularly important for your business. Part of the problem is false beliefs that creativity happens like flashes of inspiration that come out of nowhere like lightning bolts, or that creativity is something that happens to other people.

We get the chance to chat with folks who are interested in implementing strategy deployment software within their organizations almost every day. Most of the people we talk to really understand the need for this kind of solution and how it can benefit their company. Convincing others, however, can be a challenge.

KaiNexus recently invited The Toyota Way to Service Excellence author Karyn Ross to speak to our own Mark Graban, about How to Coach for Creativity and Service Excellence. Ross is a purpose-driven consultant and Lean coach at karynrossconsulting.com. Focused specifically on services, Karyn has worked with small, medium, and large organizations in sectors as diverse as insurance, financial services, HR, transportation, and retail. Using her unique Practical Creativity (TM) approach, Karyn teaches creativity techniques in combination with Toyota Way / Lean practices to help businesses retain current customers and attract new ones.

I doubt that you are still using index cards to organize your contacts, but your approach to huddle boards may be just as outdated. In the same way that an electronic contact database has a ton of advantages over a Rolodex, digital huddle boards offer valuable benefits that paper notes pinned to a poster on the wall. Here are the top reasons to consider an upgrade.

I doubt that you are still using index cards to organize your contacts, but your approach to huddle boards may be just as outdated. In the same way that an electronic contact database has a ton of advantages over a Rolodex, digital huddle boards offer valuable benefits that paper notes pinned to a poster on the wall. Here are the top reasons to consider an upgrade.

When you're thinking about rolling out Strategy Deployment in your organization, it can be intimidating to know exactly where to start, what pitfalls to avoid, and how to set yourself up for success right from the beginning. I've recently written an eBook that covers these questions, as well as information about the software you need to enable Strategy Deployment, that you can download on our blog at blog.kainexus.com.

Obviously, all of us here at KaiNexus are huge fans of continuous improvement. But I am not going to lie, I find the name to be a bit of a problem. It is clear, succinct, and meaningful, so what could be the matter?

KaiNexus webinar by Greg Jacobson and Mark Graban: Taking Improvement Boards Digital: How Leading Companies are Improving Visual Management

We get the chance to chat with a lot of frontline employees, managers, and executive leaders about all aspects of continuous improvement. We love to learn about how organizations are using the techniques and tools of Lean and other methodologies to improve results and reach their most important business goals. Gemba Walks are a practice that comes up quite a bit. Some leaders find them to be incredibly effective and welcomed by managers and staff alike, while others find them to be a chore with disappointing results.

Last month, our friends Tania Lyon and David Yeager presented at the Carnegie Foundation Summit on Lean in Education on their research and experience in spreading a culture of continuous improvement. Tania Lyon has been a KaiNexus customer for the last couple of years, and has led her team to accomplish some astounding results in her position as Director of Organizational Process Improvement. David Yeager is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and a Faculty Research Associate at UT Austin and will be presenting his research at the KaiNexus User Conference later this year.

In this podcast, Mark Graban and Dr. Greg Jacobson chat about their upcoming webinar on May 16 -- learn more at http://kainexus.com/webinars Taking Improvement Boards Digital: How Leading Companies are Improving Visual Management In this webinar you will learn: Why people use improvement boards Challenges to using physical boards How digital boards solve these challenges Examples of effective digital boards Using boards to manage strategy deployment

A popular ice breaker in business meetings these days is 3 Truths and 1 Lie. Each person says three true things about themselves and one made up thing and everyone tries to guess which is the lie. We thought that 10 truths and 1 lie would be a good way to introduce Standard Work. Can you guess which is which?

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you are probably aware by now that we produce a lot of educational material about continuous improvement methodologies, leadership, engagement strategies, and how to spread an improvement culture. Today we will look at an excerpt from our latest eBook, An Introduction to Continuous Improvement Software.

We expect that the best organizations are continuously improving. We hope they are using Lean, Six Sigma, Kaizen, and other methodologies to engage everybody in continually reinventing and improving what they do and how they do it.