TL;DR: Red metrics aren’t always bad–or even meaningful. Fear-based reactions to red drive blame and wasted effort. Lean leaders learn to distinguish signal from noise using better metrics, better thinking, and a deeper understanding of variation. Red is a color…
This edition of Ryan McCormack’s Operational Excellence Mixtape explores the tension between short-term optimization and long-term improvement. The selections highlight why stability must come before automation, how over-optimization can erode resilience, and why improvement depends as much on social systems…
Are your improvement efforts falling flat, or are you constantly chasing red dots? Are you interested in improving the way we improve? I’ve had to re-tool my Cincinnati workshop (June 17th) since my collaboration partner is now, unfortunately, unable to…
TL;DR: New Coke failed not because of execution, but because leaders misread data and misunderstood customer loyalty. Forty years later, it remains a powerful lesson in leadership humility, learning from mistakes, and improving systems instead of reacting to noise. Just…
TL;DR: The Red Bead Game shows–everywhere in the world–that blaming people for random variation is ineffective. Only system change drives improvement. So far in 2025, I’ve had the opportunity to facilitate the Red Bead Game in a variety of settings–from…
Scroll down for how to subscribe, transcript, and more My guest for Episode #525 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast is Christopher R. Chapman. He’s an experienced agile coach and consultant with a background in software development and agile transformation.…
Scroll down for how to subscribe, transcript, and more My guest for Episode #522 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast is Jacquie Maupin. She joins the podcast to discuss her upcoming workshop at the Healthcare Systems Process Improvement Conference (HSPI)…
Thanks, as always, to Ryan McCormack for this. He always shares so much good reading, listening, and viewing here! Subscribe to get these directly from Ryan via email. News, articles, books, podcasts, and videos about how to make the workplace…
KaiNexus uses Process Behavior Charts and Deming’s principles to separate signal from noise, helping leaders avoid reactive decisions and focus on improvements that truly matter. When I first began working with KaiNexus a long time ago, I was excited to…
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” report with the most read posts of the second half of the year. You can…
Scroll down for how to subscribe, transcript, and more Welcome to this bonus session of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast, originally recorded as a LinkedIn Live event! In this conversation, I partnered with Rebecca Michalik from AME Australia to discuss…
Yesterday morning, I drove to a local client to facilitate a lunch-and-learn workshop featuring the Deming “Red Bead Game” and “Process Behavior Charts.” Read more about those topics in my book, Measures of Success: React Less, Lead Better, Improve More.…