Change is hard. Even when a process is painful, people often seem more comfortable sticking with the status quo than embracing improvement.
So what can we do about that?
That's the focus of our next KaiNexus Continuous Improvement Webinar with my friend, colleague, and all-around process improvement zealot, Tracy O'Rourke.
Date: Tuesday, September 30
Time: 5:00 PM ET (note the different time than usual!)
Register here
As always, if you can't join live, the recording will be available–but if you do attend live, you'll get the benefit of asking questions during Q&A.
Listen to a Preview:
What to Expect
The title of Tracy's talk is:
“Leveraging Psychology for Effective Behavioral Change (with Process Gemba Walks)“
Tracy will explore why change is often perceived as “resistance” and why it's usually more about motivation, fear, or loss than negativity. She'll share practical strategies for leaders to motivate differently, communicate better, and connect change to what really matters to people.
She'll also connect these ideas to Gemba Walks–how they can either foster engagement or inadvertently create fear, depending on how leaders approach them.
One source of inspiration Tracy will highlight is the book Switch by Chip and Dan Heath. The tagline–“How to make change easy when change is hard”–resonates strongly with her, and she'll show how its lessons apply directly to continuous improvement work.
About Tracy
If you don't already know Tracy, here's the short version of her long list of accomplishments:
- Co-author of The Problem-Solver's Toolkit (with Elisabeth Swan)
- Co-founder and co-host of the Just-in-Time Café podcast
- UC San Diego instructor and Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt
- KaiNexus Senior Advisor
- And yes… creator of Lean parody music videos like “Baby Got Tools,“ “5S Baby“ (inspired by Vanilla Ice) and her upcoming “5 Whys” parody of NSYNC's “Bye, Bye, Bye.”
She describes herself (accurately) as a process improvement zealot–but one with humor, humility, and a deep sense of purpose. As she puts it:
“Process pain is avoidable. It steals people's joy at work. Improving processes is really about improving people's livelihood.”
Don't Miss It
Whether you lead a team, facilitate improvement, or simply want to understand why behavior change is so difficult, you'll walk away from this webinar with practical tools and fresh energy for your own work.
Hope to see you there–and if you're lucky, maybe Tracy will preview a few bars of her next parody video (but probably not the karaoke version).
Summary of the Podcast Preview:
In our recent episode of the KaiNexus Continuous Improvement Podcast, I sat down with Tracy O'Rourke for a preview of her upcoming webinar, Leveraging Psychology for Effective Behavioral Change (with Process Gemba Walks).
Tracy and I talked about one of the hardest parts of continuous improvement: not the tools, but the people side of change. Even when processes are broken or painful, many employees remain reluctant to embrace change. Leaders sometimes misinterpret this as “resistance” or negativity, but as Tracy points out, the real causes often lie elsewhere–fear, concerns about loss, or simply a lack of the right motivation.
The webinar will dig into how leaders can create the right conditions for change, drawing on concepts from the Heath brothers' book Switch: How to Make Change Easy When Change is Hard. For Tracy, this book was a turning point. It gave her new ways to understand human behavior and showed her how to apply psychology to help people succeed in improvement work.
One of the practical applications she'll share is how these lessons connect to Gemba Walks. As many of us have seen, Gemba Walks can either be a powerful tool for engagement–or, if mishandled, they can spark fear and disengagement. Tracy will illustrate how leaders can approach Gemba Walks with empathy and curiosity, so they encourage honest dialogue and improvement rather than silence or compliance.
Her perspective is grounded in experience across industries–from healthcare and government to nonprofits and Fortune 500 companies. Tracy describes herself as a “process improvement zealot,” but her zeal is really about people. As she put it:
“Process pain is avoidable. It steals people's joy at work. Improving processes is really about improving people's livelihood.”
That passion comes through clearly in our podcast conversation, where she also shares her love of parody music videos (including her upcoming 5 Whys song set to NSYNC's “Bye, Bye, Bye”). But beneath the humor, her message is serious: continuous improvement requires not just tools and methods, but also an understanding of psychology and human behavior.
If you've ever struggled to get people to buy into change, or if your Gemba Walks haven't had the impact you hoped for, this is a webinar you won't want to miss.
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Let’s build a culture of continuous improvement and psychological safety—together. If you're a leader aiming for lasting change (not just more projects), I help organizations:
- Engage people at all levels in sustainable improvement
- Shift from fear of mistakes to learning from them
- Apply Lean thinking in practical, people-centered ways
Interested in coaching or a keynote talk? Let’s talk.
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