KaiNexus: Continuous Improvement, Leadership, and More

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.

The practice of Kaizen along with the Six Sigma and Lean business process methodologies has been wide spread in manufacturing for decades. More recently other sectors have realized that the practices and principles of Kaizen can accelerate improvement in almost any organization. Like manufacturers, leaders in every industry from construction to higher education are leveraging Kaizen software to support and perfect their efforts to execute on more opportunities for improvement. For those who are not yet familiar with Kaizen software, we have put together this broad introduction.

We have noticed a theme to many of the conversations that we’ve been having with clients and at the events we have attended lately. Lots of folks have questions about the concept of Continuous Quality Improvement or CQI for short. We have put together some answers to the questions we are asked most often and even a few that people do not ask, but they really should.

We are not saying that your CEO needs shave his or her head, but depending on your improvement goals (and your CEOs attachment to their locks) it might be a great idea! To explain, back in 2016 KaiNexus set a Big Hairy Audacious Goal, known as a BHAG. A BHAG is a daunting, clear, and compelling goal an organization sets, which should not be financially driven, but it should be something that if the organization achieves it, would really move the needle forward and indicate the organization has accomplished something.