Listen:
In this special bonus episode of Lean Blog Interviews, Mark Graban is joined by C.J. Kaufman, Education Chair for the ASQ Cincinnati Section, to preview the ASQ Southwest Ohio 2025 Conference, themed “Excellence Through Quality.“
Taking place Saturday, November 8, 2025, in Mason, Ohio, the event brings together quality professionals from the Cincinnati and Dayton regions for a half-day of engaging speakers, practical insights, and networking — plus an optional afternoon workshop with Mark.
C.J. shares how the conference was designed collaboratively by the Cincinnati and Dayton ASQ Sections, what attendees can expect, and why psychological safety is a cornerstone topic for today's quality and Lean leaders.
Highlights
- Event Overview: ASQ Southwest Ohio 2025 — a collaboration between Cincinnati and Dayton sections.
- Theme: Excellence Through Quality — exploring leadership, teamwork, and continuous improvement.
- Keynote: Mark Graban on Psychological Safety, Quality, and Continuous Improvement.
- Featured Speakers Include:
- Deb Coviello — Leading Quality
- Susan Marshall — FDA Perspectives on ROI in Quality Management
- Colleen Soppelsa — Group Intelligence in Problem-Solving
- Optional Workshop: Hands-on Lean learning with Mark Graban in the afternoon session.
- Why It Matters: Quality and continuous improvement thrive when organizations foster safety, trust, and engagement.
Quotable Moments
“Psychological safety is essential for positive change — without it, continuous improvement can't sustain.” — Mark Graban
“We want people to leave with practical things they can use Monday morning.” — C.J. Kaufman
“Excellence through quality isn't just a theme — it's how we build better systems and better workplaces.” — Mark Graban
Event Details
- Location: Mason, Ohio
- Date: Saturday, November 8, 2025
- Time: 8:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. (Workshop to follow)
- Includes: Breakfast + Lunch
- More Info & Registration — ASQ Cincinnati Section Website
Related Links
Videos
Transcript:
Mark Graban: Hi, it's Mark Graban. Welcome to a bonus episode of Lean Blog Interviews. Today we're going to be talking a little bit about an upcoming event. It is the ASQ Southwest Ohio 2025 conference on the theme of “Excellence Through Quality.”
So if you are in the Cincinnati area or the Dayton area, or if you'd like to drive a little bit on a Saturday, it's going to be Saturday, November 8th, 2025, from 8:00 AM to 1:00 PM in Mason, Ohio, which is not too far north of Cincinnati.
There will be a link for more information in the show notes. We're joined by CJ Kaufman. He is, among other things, the education chair for the ASQ Cincinnati section. CJ, how are you?
C.J. Kaufman: Good morning. Nice to see you.
Mark Graban: Yeah, it's good to see you again. I've come to a couple of the local ASQ Cincinnati events, and I'll look forward to seeing you and many others on Saturday, the 8th.
So, if you would, give us an overview. It's a busy morning with a lot of great speakers, and then we'll talk a little bit about my role and an optional afternoon activity.
C.J. Kaufman: Well, that was something that we're doing in tandem with the Dayton ASQ section–putting on this half-day conference. It's an opportunity for quality people to come and receive just an amazing lineup of speakers and practical things that they can begin using the next week. We've also included breakfast and lunch, as well as an optional workshop in the afternoon by yourself, Mark.
And you're also doing the keynote, speaking on psychological safety, which is an important topic for all of us as we're looking at making positive changes in the organizations that we're working in. But, I'm excited about the different speakers. You know, several of them have a professional engineering background. Several of them are authors and have been really contributing to the process improvement thought leadership space.
Mark Graban: Yeah, it's really a mixed, varied lineup in terms of people's backgrounds and industries. So, Deb Coviello is going to be speaking about leading quality. Deb is actually going to be a guest on the My Favorite Mistake podcast with me. We are recording that very shortly.
Susan Marshall is talking about quality management initiatives and the FDA's perspectives on the economic and public health return on investment. And a friend of mine from the Cincinnati area who I've met a number of times, Colleen Soppelsa, is going to be speaking about group intelligence in problem-solving.
So there's a really good theme, really good variety. CJ, before we talk about some of my topics, I'm going to throw a question at you. On that theme of “Excellence Through Quality,” I'd be curious to hear your general thoughts on how quality really can be a strategy for excellence as an organization and in business.
C.J. Kaufman: That's a great perspective because many times organizations are focused on business as usual, and a great deal of effort is just keeping the lights on. And then when you take an approach that quality doesn't subtract, it doesn't cost, then you're really focused on advancing the organization and the company, reducing issues that you are normally firefighting, and then long-term, that really adds to your team's capacity. So I found that out through my experience and also by noticing the impact that other people have had on the companies that they've worked for from a consulting aspect.
Mark Graban: It's fair to say ASQ as a society and members in ASQ would reject the idea if a company or its leaders were to say, “Well, we can't afford better quality.” That's not really the right way to look at it.
C.J. Kaufman: No, not at all. You know, quality is just the foundational aspect of what a company can provide to their customers as well as their internal employees. Certainly, there can be an over-emphasis on cutting costs when you're implementing some sort of a process improvement, but I think of it more as a holistic approach than necessarily focusing on just that one leg of a process improvement effort.
Mark Graban: Yeah, I mean, I think it's two sides of the same coin. When we improve processes and systems, better quality and lower costs go hand in hand. When we do it right the first time–not just as a cheesy slogan, but when we actually have systems that include equipment and people and technologies and communication that allow us to do things right the first time. We're probably preaching to the choir in this podcast, but maybe there's a good opportunity for someone to invite a colleague or a friend to come to the event and maybe it can open some eyes.
C.J. Kaufman: And I think that's really the focus that we've taken with the Cincinnati section: what kind of tools and encouragement can we provide members to help them be successful? All of us are really aligned. It's very much a part of our career to be process-focused. You know, how could we advance the company that we're in? Sometimes, though, just based on our experience and where we're at, we come across challenges that we just need some additional help with. And that's what we're doing here by bringing all these speakers together.
Mark Graban: Well, I'm excited to learn from the others. And, as you had mentioned, I'm going to be speaking about psychological safety. We could frame that as a foundation for quality improvement, a foundation for operational excellence, a foundation for Lean. Some of the stories and examples I think of, you know, 30 years ago, early in my career at General Motors, are of getting punished for speaking up about quality problems and quality risks, being out of sync with a culture that quite often was trying to put quantity before quality.
And when you get punished for speaking up, people, for the most part, learn to stop speaking up. And then we can't reduce defects that people feel pressured into hiding or covering up or blaming others for. So in a nutshell, and I'll elaborate on this in the talk, psychological safety just basically means how safe do you feel speaking up about anything? Pointing out a problem, admitting a mistake, sharing an idea, or testing a quality improvement idea.
We want environments where people feel safe to speak up. That doesn't mean we all magically agree. But, as anyone who's done quality improvement work knows, there may be times we disagree, and we want to invite that and look at data and our experiments. If we have two varying opinions about which approach is going to reduce defects more, let's test them. Let's let the best idea win instead of the most powerful person's idea winning.
So, hopefully what I'm going to share is going to be relevant whether people are using Lean frameworks or not. I think hopefully people would agree we're better off when more people are speaking up candidly and openly, and we'll work through any of the disagreement that comes up. So I'll be talking about some practical things that we can do as leaders or as peer colleagues to help people feel rewarded for speaking up.
C.J. Kaufman: And when I was thinking about psychological safety, a big part of it is driving out fear. And when you have a fear of actually speaking up–I won't say speaking out, but sharing your perspective–that really does not benefit the company for people to be quiet. But like you mentioned, there are different cultures and different organizations that have different levels of safety where a person can share. And so, I'm looking forward to the information that you'll present on that because that will help us frame how we can interact with other people. We're always going to come across different social styles of people that have different ways of communicating, and we need to know how we can best support people as they go about their day-to-day activities.
Mark Graban: Yeah, I think that's well said. As you put it, it's a matter of how safe you feel. It's not a binary safe/unsafe, any more than quality is a binary of good quality or bad quality. There are degrees, and we want people to feel more safe, if not perfectly safe. And you talk about driving out fear. So, I'm going to connect things back to W. Edwards Deming.
And the afternoon session, a two-hour workshop. It's an optional, separate registration after the networking lunch for those who would like to stay. I will be facilitating my version–I don't think it varies wildly from Dr. Deming's version–of the classic Red Bead Experiment or the Red Bead game. I have some framing around it that I think makes it fun and engaging, but it teaches the classic lessons in a very experiential way about some of the things leaders do to try to admonish people into better quality through slogans and other things that Dr. Deming warned against and decried.
From the Red Bead Experiment, we generate defect data. So beyond the qualitative discussion of the things managers sometimes do in their attempt to improve quality, this will also serve either as an introduction or a refresher course around process behavior charts, which is statistician Donald Wheeler's terminology for control charts. The XmR chart methodology. So that we can start learning to distinguish between signal and noise, not just applying control charts to dimensional manufacturing part measurements, you know, the size of a hole, but to apply that same thinking and that same thought process to our performance metrics. Whether that's quality performance over time–basically any time-series data that we measure and present and talk about in an organization. I've learned the process behavior chart methodology. I think it's the best framework for looking at metrics, and I think a two-hour workshop gives a good introduction to all those topics.
Now, CJ, that's something… I'm sure you've played, I'm guessing.
C.J. Kaufman: No, I actually have not. So I'm actually looking forward to it, and I might egg people on because many people think that processes are set up for their success. And so many times when I've gone into problem-solving, one of the first things that I hear as a solution or countermeasure is, “Well, more training needs to be done.” But people really need to question whether the process actually is set up for success. Maybe it's not, and they just don't realize it. They're thinking it is, and then once you map things out, you realize, “Wow, maybe we could restructure this to have a better outcome.”
Mark Graban: Yeah. ‘Cause when you have a bad process, people often find workarounds. It may or may not make things better, but they're doing their best. And again, there might be that fear of raising an idea publicly to a manager or a team, so they're doing things differently. And then a manager might discover that and chastise the person for not following the process. Right. As if greater adherence to a bad process would lead to better results. We need to try to turn workarounds or attempted improvement into real improvement. And that starts with people feeling safe speaking up. I think it's also followed with some statistical methods that we can all learn and use.
So maybe you'll be a willing worker.
C.J. Kaufman: I'm definitely interested in doing that.
Mark Graban: Okay. Well, put your hand up first or stand up, CJ. That's right. I'll call on you. And you can be part of that.
So I hope people who are listening or watching will come join us if you are anywhere near Cincinnati or Dayton, Central Ohio, Kentucky, or Indiana. If you want to get up and drive early or come in on Friday night, it starts at 8 o'clock Saturday morning. Again, November 8th in Mason, Ohio. The main day runs from 8:00 AM to 1:00 PM, which includes a networking lunch in addition to a networking breakfast. Great speakers, a networking lunch, and then I hope people will stay between 1:00 and 3:00 for the Red Bead game. And again, look in the show notes for a link to the event and more information about how to register.
So, CJ, thanks for getting together and having a chat. Thank you for this back-and-forth about the event, and thank you for your role in organizing it. Shout out to William Harvey and everybody else who's involved. Again, thanks, CJ.
C.J. Kaufman: Thank you, Mark. Great to be here.
Mark Graban: Bye.
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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.
