KaiNexus: Continuous Improvement, Leadership, and More

Register for the webinar

Join Mark Graban as he hosts Elizabeth Chase to preview her webinar...

April 24 from 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm ET

Presented by Elizabeth Chase

One City’s (and Library’s) Lean Story… Abridged
Join us for a look at how one library’s practice of Lean introduced a city to its benefits and informed the design of the 5th largest public library in Texas, a 158,000-square-foot library (in a repurposed rocket factory).
Covering everything from creating a Lean training curriculum to specific examples of applied Lean fundamentals – with a detour into Vaccine site administration – this webinar has something for everyone interested in continuous improvement and/or libraries.
Attendees will be able to ask as many questions that dive into specific details as time allows.

Elizabeth Chase is the Material Services Manager for the Frisco Public Library.

Elizabeth began her career with the City of Frisco in 2003. Before taking her current position, her roles at the Library included Adult Services Reference Librarian, Cataloger, and Senior Librarian.

In the category of “other duties as assigned,” Elizabeth is a member of the Frisco Lean Team Steering Committee, which develops and implements Lean certification for City employees. Her primary role is teaching a 4-hour Lean fundamentals class to employees throughout the City and celebrating the improvements made as a result.

Find the blog post and the infographic

Written by Danielle Yoon, read by Mark Graban.

The post starts:

Manufacturers of all kinds seek to achieve continuous quality improvement because it ensures the consistency of products delivered to customers and protects against the competition. It also paves the path to compliance with industry-specific standards. This is crucial in the automotive sector because defective vehicle parts may lead to expensive recalls—or worse, accidents that cost lives.

Fortunately, continuous improvement has a long history in automotive manufacturing. Many of the tools and techniques widely used by organizations worldwide were explicitly developed to ensure the quality and efficiency of automotive manufacturing. Toyota was a pioneer of many of the CQI approaches used today. Whether you are using language like CQI, TQM, Lean, TPS, or Lean Six Sigma, these approaches described below still apply.

As you might imagine, the benefits of a successful continuous improvement program are significant, including:

6 Steps to Continuous Improvement in the Automotive Industry

Welcome to the KaiNexus Continuous Improvement Podcast. Today, we're excited to host Greg Jacobson, a lean thinker, and an inspiring visionary who has made significant strides in propagating the lean approach in the healthcare sector and beyond.

Learn more about KaiNexicon

In this captivating dialogue, Mark Graban helps unravel the remarkable journey of Greg, highlighting his deep-rooted dedication to continuous improvement that stretches back to his early days in his mother's tuxedo shop.

Unfolding the chapters of Greg's extraordinary journey, we learn about the inception of KaiNexus, which came to life from the chaos of email clutter, evolving to become a robust system that fosters improvement and efficiency. Greg's story serves as a testament to the far-reaching influence of a single individual's dedication to constant betterment, potentially catalyzing a revolution in the industry by propelling productivity and quality of care forward.

Video, slides, and more

Presented by Tracy Defoe

How do you develop coaching skills in yourself and others? Why would you want to?

Everyone who manages people is asked to coach. Most of us think we are good at it. If you were lucky enough to learn how to develop and coach people because you were coached well from the start of your career, you are unusual. Most of us have to learn a new, quiet way of working with people to coach and develop them.

Join kata coach Tracy Defoe for her ideas on developing coaching skills the Toyota Kata way, based on years of personal and group experiential learning experiments.

This webinar is a preview of a deep dive Tracy is facilitating at the upcoming Kata Summit, KataCon10, coming up in April 2024.

Tracy Defoe is an adult educator specializing in learning at work. About ten years ago she started coaching to develop a scientific mindset in people improving their processes at work using the Improvement and Coaching Kata detailed in Mike Rother's Toyota Kata books. She is a cofounder of the global women's group Kata Girl Geeks, cofounder of Kata School Cascadia, and a facilitator with Tilo Schwarz's Kata Coaching Dojo Masterclass.

Read the blog post

We often describe Kaizen as a way of looking at the world rather than a prescription for how to achieve positive change. Kaizen thinkers seek to make small changes to operations daily in search of higher quality, more efficiency, and less waste. But because the concept of Kaizen is so philosophical, it can be a challenge for people new to the idea to understand what it means in practical terms.

Related: What is Kaizen?

One useful tool for training managers to adopt the Kaizen mindset is called the 5 M’s. By consistently examining the 5 M’s, managers will be able to recognize when something in a process is not working and improve efficiency and profitability. This model can be used for risk mitigation, addressing safety issues, and improving quality. It can be used right alongside other Kaizen techniques such as the 5 Whys, 5S, and Gemba walks.

To be presented March 21 from 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm ET

Registration Link

Visit the KaiNexus YouTube Channel

In this episode, we hear three clips with Tory Schrock, Director of Organizational Excellence at Pella Regional Health Center.

Learn more about KaiNexus

The blog post

Ecologists and other environmentally aware people often talk about the goal of "Zero Waste." But, of course, that's an outstanding goal for business as well.
Reducing waste is at the heart of the Lean business methodology. The purpose of Lean is to spend more of your time creating value for customers by reducing or eliminating everything that does not produce value (AKA the waste). Value can take the form of finished goods, services, or information. To make it easier to identify waste in business processes, Lean practitioners target eight specific types of waste.
Although the Lean approach originated in manufacturing, it is used in almost every sector. Strikingly the eight wastes are common across industries, including software development, construction, healthcare, and education. Although it is not as apparent as it may be on a factory floor, the set of tasks and activities performed in any sector creates a production process that ultimately provides value to a customer.
While some of the wastes are self-explanatory, others are more difficult to recognize. This post aims to help by giving a few examples of each type of waste in various businesses. Hopefully, they will help you think about how waste may be occurring in your operations and how to begin designing processes that minimize it. Of course, the people who are most likely to find and correct waste are the process operators, so it is a good idea to share these examples with them and provide a way for each employee to submit opportunities for improvement.

Read the blog post

Written by Maggie Millard, read by Mark Graban

Businesses use a host of methodologies to bring structure to the process of identifying and acting upon opportunities for improvement. You may be familiar with Six Sigma, Kaizen, Lean, Toyota Production System, and others. Although these methodologies differ, the foundation of each of them is the continuous improvement model. 
The continuous improvement model reflects the idea that organizations should constantly implement incremental improvements to services, products, and processes. The approach applies to every industry and size of business. Several central principles guide the continuous improvement model.