Mark Graban

When I first began working with KaiNexus a long time ago, I was excited to find opportunities to share methods that had been transformative...

What I learned in Japan confirms it: the power of Lean isn't in the templates--it's in the thinking, the actions, and the learning behind...

At its core, Lean is about people--respecting them, empowering them, and ensuring their well-being while driving continuous improvement. Recently, GE Aerospace's Lynn, MA, facility...

In my 2023 KaiNexus webinar, I explored the critical intersection of Psychological Safety and Continuous Improvement. Here are the top five takeaways that summarize...

Sometimes, wisdom comes wrapped in unexpected packaging--like a fortune cookie. Recently, my friend Alan Wikler, Psy.D., came across one with a simple yet profound...

Blame-based cultures kill improvement. Leaders must resolve to build trust and safety if they want innovation and engagement. During Katie Anderson's #JapanStudyTrip this past November,...

Charts like this always make me wonder why we throw away the additional context of data from 2016 when we start the 2017 chart. It's unlikely that January 1st in any given year is the magical creation of a new system or a new process. In other words, January 2017 was likely the same process as December 2016. The annual cutoffs are arbitrary. Sure, people are accustomed to thinking in annual cycles, but is this helpful for improvement?

Here's a musical holiday treat for my regular Lean Blog readers and podcast listeners, a song parody, initially released in 2009, and then remastered...

Two years ago, I received an unexpected and incredibly specific Christmas gift from Charles Desneuf on LinkedIn. He wrote a PDF eBook about Process...

Thanks, everybody, for reading my blog here in 2024. And for listening to podcasts... oh so many podcasts. This blog post is the annual "year-end"...

I'm all for visualizing data and performance measures in the form of a chart. Charts are far better visuals than "bowlers" or "bowling charts,"...

Are "visuals" and "visual management" the same thing? Are "visuals" always Lean, necessarily? In this post, I talk about the differences using an example from a hospital and my car's dashboard.