Making Lean Work

💥 Dr Shigeo Shingo was one of the most influential thinkers in the history of continuous improvement.

And it’s where my own improvement journey started.

For decades, Shingo’s thinking has been a source of learning for me.


Challenging conventional wisdom.

Challenging mental models.

And challenging us to think differently about how work, leadership and improvement really happen.

So this one means a lot.

I’m absolutely honoured to have been invited to deliver a keynote at the Shingo Connect European Conference in Kraków this December.

To be speaking at an event carrying the Shingo name, after more than 30 years on my own improvement journey, feels pretty special.

I’ll be sharing some of what I’ve learned along the way and exploring a question I’ve spent much of my career trying to answer:


Why do so many organisations and their teams struggle to make Lean and continuous improvement work?

And, more importantly, what can leaders do differently?

Super excited about this one.

🟢 This will be big...

I am absolutely thrilled to be speaking at the The Association for Manufacturing Excellence (AME) International Conference at the end of October.



AME is well known for great speakers, best-practice site visits and community building.



And this must be one of the biggest and best conferences in the leadership improvement calendar worldwide.



Looking forward to catching up with the AME team and a few old and new friends.



I'll be running an interactive leadership session on how leaders can make lean and continuous improvement work



See you at the AME Milwaukee 2026 October 26 – 29.

Then back home for Halloween celebrations 🎃🎃🎃👻


, ,

Kimberlee (Kim) Humphrey, Barbara Clayton, Ryan Zeng, CSSBB, LGC, PgMP, Sara O'Hara, Melisa Buie, PhD Dr. William Harvey, PST, RBLP-T, Javier Mr. Nearshoring® Zarazua, Rebecca Michalik GAICD, Karen Martin

💥 Want to build a real improvement culture?

Then you need to change the hierarchical mgmt paradigm.

One overriding lesson from applying Lean thinking and continuous improvement across:

Construction.
Manufacturing.
Service.
Government.
Retail.
Tech & software development.
Healthcare

Leaders, managers and supervisors have to act differently.

Not simply learn more tools, launching more initiatives or turn up for report outs.

But change how they lead.

Move away from hierarchy built around control, answers and fear towards leadership that:

→ Removes the drag of fear

→ Creates meaningful work

→ Develops people

→ Helps teams solve problems

→ Enables people to be successful

You can't build an improvement culture if the management system and leadership behaviours keep reinforcing the old one.

Great hearing different perspectives on this today from Rich Sheridan, Jeffrey Liker, John Dyer Patrick Adams, Jason Schroeder, Joe Dyer and many more.

A great day of learning and conversations at the Lean Solutions Global Lean Summit.

🟢 Getting the pre-work done in Grand Rapids. 🇺🇸

✔️ Familiarised myself with the venue
✔️ Met a few of the audience
✔️ Ran through the presentation and equipment
✔️ Even managed to squeeze in a quick trip downtown

Now I’m ready.

Really looking forward to the next few days at the Lean Global Summit and exploring a question I see in organisations everywhere:

Why do so many managers struggle to drive continuous improvement - even those with the tools, training and big improvement teams already in place?

And more importantly, what do leaders need to do differently to make improvement part of how the business is actually managed?

Great catching up with Rich Sheridan, Joe Dyer, Patrick Adams and the team. Big thanks to Shayne Daughenbaugh and his lovely wife for showing around Grand Rapids.

Looking forward to tomorrow

# LeanGlobalSummit
# MakingLeanWork
# Leadership

🟢 Three flights ahead of me, but I’m genuinely excited to be heading to Grand Rapids, Michigan, to join Patrick Adams, Shayne Daughenbaugh and the team at the Lean Global Summit.

A great line-up, with some of the very best in the Lean and Continuous Improvement community.

I’ll be tackling a subject I feel strongly about:

Why so much improvement activity fails to make the business better.

I’ll share some of the common improvement pitfalls I see organisations fall into despite investing heavily in Lean, training and improvement teams.

More importantly, I’ll explore what leaders and improvement teams can do differently to avoid them, create greater value and build an improvement system that actually works.

Looking forward to learning, challenging a few assumptions and catching up with some familiar faces.

# Lean

💚 There’s just no other place that reminds me quite so clearly of the importance of time.

Back at Swansea Bay University Health Board today, meeting with a senior cardiologist to review the work on improving the patient pathway.

The result?

More than 45 weeks taken out of referral-to-treatment time (90% reduction)

Businesses often focus on efficiency and delivering on time.

Both matter.

But one of the biggest opportunities is often reducing the time it takes to deliver value.

In healthcare:

Referral → Treatment

In manufacturing:

Order → Delivery

In product development:

Idea → Launch

Reducing those lead times doesn't just improve a KPI.

- It means patients treated sooner.
- Customers getting what they need faster.
- New products reaching the market earlier.
- Lower production / service cost

Time is one of the clearest measures of how well a system really works.

Great to be back today looking at the progress and, more importantly, what we do next.

# Makingleanwork

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Some places make work travel much more enjoyable.

Edinburgh is definitely one of them.

A flying visit for a customer meeting, but it never fails to impress.

A beautiful city, rich in history, and home to a fantastic business with a management team that knows it can do better.

Those are always the best conversations.

Not because they have all the answers, but because they have the humility to ask better questions and the ambition to improve.

Looking forward to seeing where the journey takes them.

🌐 I'm delighted to be speaking at the Lean Solutions Summit 2026 this September.

I'll be sharing practical lessons from working with leaders around the world on what it really takes to make Lean and continuous improvement deliver sustainable business results.

My session, "A Leader’s Guide to Making Lean & Continuous Improvement Work", challenges some of the biggest assumptions in business improvement and explores why leadership, management systems and the right improvement strategy matter far more than another toolkit.

If you're looking to build a stronger improvement culture, develop leadership capability, and achieve better business outcomes, I'd love to see you there.

🎟️ Register here: https://findleansolutions.regfox.com/lean-solutions-summit-2026

Who's joining me in Michigan?

🟢 What's the point of Value Stream Mapping?
Ask that question, and you'll usually hear:
• Eliminate waste...
• Generate improvement initiatives.
• Think more strategically.
• Create a transformation plan for the value stream.

They're all reasonable answers.
But I think they're missing the point.
And that's one reason so many future-state value stream maps never become reality.

For me, Value Stream Mapping isn't the destination. It's one step in the improvement cycle for leaders with end-to-end responsibility for a value stream.

Its real purpose is to help the value stream manager and their team understand how the value stream actually works.

To expose how value flows (or doesn't).
To identify the few constraints limiting performance.
To align everyone around the actions that will create flow and deliver what customers actually value.

If your definition of Lean is simply eliminating waste, reducing non-value-added activity, or debating whether there's a ninth or tenth waste...
You're missing the point and aiming far too low.

This is also why Value Stream Mapping works best as part of a leader-led continuous improvement strategy.

When leaders own the value stream, the map becomes far more than an analysis tool. It becomes the basis for leadership, prioritisation, coaching, and daily decision-making.
The output isn't a future-state map.
It's a leadership team that understands its system well enough to improve it.

How is Value Stream Mapping used in your organisation: as a one-off workshop, or as part of how leaders run the business?

-led CI

🟢 Current-state value stream map: done.

✓ Process-box data completed and validated
✓ Information flows verified
✓ Lead-time ladder being finalised
✓ Problems and non-value-added activity identified

Next up: developing the future state and improvement plan.

So, how do you develop your future-state improvement plan?

Do you go after the big-ticket items?

Pick off the low-hanging fruit?

Use an Eisenhower-style matrix?
Ranking every waste / idea by ease versus impact?

Prioritise all the non-value-added activity you’ve found?

Not us.

We won’t start by asking:
What should we improve?

We’ll start by asking:
What does the customer really need?

Then:
What is the best strategy for fulfilling that need?

How should value flow through the value stream?

Where should work flow and where should it pull?

How should planning and production be redesigned to support that flow?

Only then will we define the improvement plan needed to move from the current state to the future state.

Because a future-state value stream map isn’t a prioritised list of NVA activities or problems to fix.

The future state should determine the improvements.

Not the other way around.

Don’t improve your current state by optimising the non-value-added activity within it.

Design a better one.

leadership