I was saddened to learn that Kim Barnas passed away on January 3, 2026. She was 69.
My deepest condolences go out to her family and the many colleagues and friends she influenced over the course of a remarkable career.
I first met Kim when she was a senior vice president at ThedaCare, leading Appleton Medical Center and Theda Clark Hospital. She was one of those leaders who didn't just talk about Lean — she was in the work, learning alongside her teams, building something that didn't exist yet. She later succeeded Dr. John Toussaint as CEO of Catalysis, the not-for-profit education institute, where she continued teaching and sharing what she'd learned with health systems around the world.
Her book Beyond Heroes: A Lean Management System for Healthcare won the Shingo Publication Award and has been translated into several languages. She also co-authored Becoming the Change with John. Both books reflected Kim's orientation toward practical, grounded leadership rather than theory from a distance.
What Stood Out from Our Conversation
I was fortunate to have Kim as a guest on the Lean Blog Interviews podcast back in 2014. A few things from that conversation have stayed with me.
One was her honesty about how she came to Lean. She described herself as “one of those spontaneous people that Lean would never be able to tame.” She didn't arrive as a convert. She arrived skeptical, carrying a lexicon book everywhere, trying to make sense of a language and a way of thinking that didn't come naturally to her. That openness to admitting what she didn't know — and learning anyway — was a thread that ran through everything she did.
She talked about the deal she struck with her sensei, Jose Bustillo: “If you teach me Lean, I'll teach you healthcare.” That kind of mutual respect set the tone for her whole approach to leadership development.
Another moment I keep coming back to is her story about developing ThedaCare's lean management system. Her sensei would draw a picture on a napkin at dinner — every dinner, for about a year — showing how improvement spreads from one cell to two to four. Kim would politely thank him and move on. One day, she got it. What he was trying to tell her was that you can't sustain improvement by sending a facilitator to lead something and then walking away. You need infrastructure. That realization became the foundation for the management system she built, one that other health systems have since adopted far more quickly because Kim and her team did the slow, unglamorous work of figuring it out first.
She was also clear-eyed about heroes. The title of her book was a provocation for a reason. In healthcare, we celebrate heroic behavior — the nurse who tracked down the missing equipment, the physician who improvised when things went sideways. Kim's point wasn't that those moments don't matter. Her point was that if heroic behavior is required every day, the system is broken.
“We have 6,000 to 6,500 people that all want to make changes every day,” she said. “If we weren't making changes in a methodical, process-oriented way, those 6,000 heroes would create chaos.”
And she was practical about safety culture in a way that I think still holds up. She described making safety rounds with her leadership team on Monday mornings and asking a simple question: “How can we help you?” She emphasized that when someone brings forward a concern, you never assign the follow-up back to the person who raised it. “Once you do that,” she said, “no one will ever bring you anything again.” That's the kind of operational insight that only comes from doing the work.
A Career That Mattered
Kim's obituary mentions that during her final hospital stays, she saw some of the techniques she had taught around the world being used locally, at Aurora BayCare Medical Center. I can't think of a more fitting reflection of a career well spent.
She started as a single mother in family practice and women's health in Alma, Michigan. She earned her graduate degree, rose through executive leadership, built a globally recognized management system, wrote books that changed how people think about healthcare leadership, and led an organization dedicated to helping others do the same.
What kind of legacy do you hope to leave through your work and the people you've influenced along the way?
