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Ryan McCormack's May 1, 2026 Operational Excellence Mixtape rounds up current thinking on AI in supply chain improvement, process behavior over spec-checking (Wheeler), waste audits at UMass Memorial, and the shift from change management to building organizational resilience and stability. It closes with a nod to John Wooden's coaching principles, recently echoed by Cori Close's first NCAA title at UCLA women's basketball.
Operational Excellence, Improvement, and Innovation
How AI reshapes continuous improvement in supply chains
Continuous improvement has served supply chain well for years. But the need for real-time feedback loops across the value chain mean that traditional improvement efforts need to leverage new tools, like AI. Here's how AI is elevating human roles in supply chains.
Signals over specs
When problems occur, we tend to tighten the inputs we control, adjusting things we can change, only to find the inputs look fine. Meanwhile, we miss obvious signals in the process itself that would have let us respond much sooner. Dr. Wheeler emphasizes that watching how a process behaves over time gives better insight for solving problems than simply checking whether outputs meet specifications.
Reducing medical waste and emissions by auditing the trash can
Improvement can be a dirty job, but the team at UMass Memorial embraces it. A team of medical students conduct “trash audits” to identify opportunities to reduce waste and emissions. Talk about “going to the source” to collect data!
Creating a Culture of Improvement
CEOs lean in on “resilience”
It looks like CEOs arrived to the party on the human and cognitive impact of continuous change and uncertainty, and the need for organizational resilience and adaptation, albeit a little later than the rest of their people. This (should) change the perspective of what we expect from leaders, and how we develop and promote leaders – and hopefully put an end to “suck it up, buttercup” approaches to building resilience. The ability to stay calm and lead through shock is the new normal for leaders.
Just how dead is change management?
Change just feels different these days. Faster. Never-ending. Disjointed.
It seems like leaders come and go, the org structure is in a continuous renovation, and there's nothing left that you can reliably “hold on” to. So it shouldn't be surprising that the tidy, templated, methodology-heavy approach to change management is just not cutting it – and truthfully, it probably never did.
Caroline Kealy, who declared change management dead in 2025, shares that what people need in 2026 isn't more communication and training plans, but rather greater agency, belonging, and – yes – even some certainty.
If you're wondering what we can do to actually create better conditions for people to thrive in an era of continuous uncertainty, listen to Caroline Kealey on episode 73 of Change Signal – Just How Dead is Change Management.
Engineering stability through organizational change
To reinforce the point above, organizations are seeking to engineer greater stability in order to reduce the “cognitive tax” related to continuous change. Stability is the new change management.
Favourite management tips on organizational change
Demonstrating perhaps that a one-size-fits-all change methodology is not desirable, or more likely that we know very little about how to lead organizational change, HBR published a list of organizational change management tips from a variety of sources.
“Aim for clarity, not total transparency” resonated with me. What are your favourite tips?
Coaching – Developing Self & Others
Principles are principles because they stand the test of time – and the most enduring coaching principles in sports (and excellence) belong to John Wooden‘s. Wooden's pyramid of success continues to be the pinnacle of coaching models.
Wooden's legacy lives on in 2026 as evidenced by Cori Close leading UCLA women's to its first NCAA title using Wooden's coaching principles.
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