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Leading Organisational Excellence is a proven system to help business leaders and managers in multi-site organisations create an highly effective culture of continuous improvement skyrocketing business performance, without the day to day drama.

21/08/2026

💚 There’s just no other place that reminds me quite so clearly of the importance of time.

Back at Swansea Bay University Health Board today, meeting with a senior cardiologist to review the work on improving the patient pathway.

The result?

More than 45 weeks taken out of referral-to-treatment time (90% reduction)

Businesses often focus on efficiency and delivering on time.

Both matter.

But one of the biggest opportunities is often reducing the time it takes to deliver value.

In healthcare:

Referral → Treatment

In manufacturing:

Order → Delivery

In product development:

Idea → Launch

Reducing those lead times doesn't just improve a KPI.

- It means patients treated sooner.
- Customers getting what they need faster.
- New products reaching the market earlier.
- Lower production / service cost

Time is one of the clearest measures of how well a system really works.

Great to be back today looking at the progress and, more importantly, what we do next.

# Makingleanwork

31/07/2026

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Some places make work travel much more enjoyable.

Edinburgh is definitely one of them.

A flying visit for a customer meeting, but it never fails to impress.

A beautiful city, rich in history, and home to a fantastic business with a management team that knows it can do better.

Those are always the best conversations.

Not because they have all the answers, but because they have the humility to ask better questions and the ambition to improve.

Looking forward to seeing where the journey takes them.

16/07/2026

🌐 I'm delighted to be speaking at the Lean Solutions Summit 2026 this September.

I'll be sharing practical lessons from working with leaders around the world on what it really takes to make Lean and continuous improvement deliver sustainable business results.

My session, "A Leader’s Guide to Making Lean & Continuous Improvement Work", challenges some of the biggest assumptions in business improvement and explores why leadership, management systems and the right improvement strategy matter far more than another toolkit.

If you're looking to build a stronger improvement culture, develop leadership capability, and achieve better business outcomes, I'd love to see you there.

🎟️ Register here: https://findleansolutions.regfox.com/lean-solutions-summit-2026

Who's joining me in Michigan?

14/07/2026

🟢 What's the point of Value Stream Mapping?
Ask that question, and you'll usually hear:
• Eliminate waste...
• Generate improvement initiatives.
• Think more strategically.
• Create a transformation plan for the value stream.

They're all reasonable answers.
But I think they're missing the point.
And that's one reason so many future-state value stream maps never become reality.

For me, Value Stream Mapping isn't the destination. It's one step in the improvement cycle for leaders with end-to-end responsibility for a value stream.

Its real purpose is to help the value stream manager and their team understand how the value stream actually works.

To expose how value flows (or doesn't).
To identify the few constraints limiting performance.
To align everyone around the actions that will create flow and deliver what customers actually value.

If your definition of Lean is simply eliminating waste, reducing non-value-added activity, or debating whether there's a ninth or tenth waste...
You're missing the point and aiming far too low.

This is also why Value Stream Mapping works best as part of a leader-led continuous improvement strategy.

When leaders own the value stream, the map becomes far more than an analysis tool. It becomes the basis for leadership, prioritisation, coaching, and daily decision-making.
The output isn't a future-state map.
It's a leadership team that understands its system well enough to improve it.

How is Value Stream Mapping used in your organisation: as a one-off workshop, or as part of how leaders run the business?

-led CI

10/07/2026

🟢 Current-state value stream map: done.

✓ Process-box data completed and validated
✓ Information flows verified
✓ Lead-time ladder being finalised
✓ Problems and non-value-added activity identified

Next up: developing the future state and improvement plan.

So, how do you develop your future-state improvement plan?

Do you go after the big-ticket items?

Pick off the low-hanging fruit?

Use an Eisenhower-style matrix?
Ranking every waste / idea by ease versus impact?

Prioritise all the non-value-added activity you’ve found?

Not us.

We won’t start by asking:
What should we improve?

We’ll start by asking:
What does the customer really need?

Then:
What is the best strategy for fulfilling that need?

How should value flow through the value stream?

Where should work flow and where should it pull?

How should planning and production be redesigned to support that flow?

Only then will we define the improvement plan needed to move from the current state to the future state.

Because a future-state value stream map isn’t a prioritised list of NVA activities or problems to fix.

The future state should determine the improvements.

Not the other way around.

Don’t improve your current state by optimising the non-value-added activity within it.

Design a better one.

leadership

01/07/2026

🔴 42% Value Added vs. 2%
Same company. Similar process. Different country.

It's coming up to VSM workshop week, and it got me thinking about the time that I got a call from a global head of business improvement.

One team in the US had mapped a value stream and concluded it had 42% value-adding. Our team in the UK had mapped a similar process and found less than 2%.

"One of these has to be wrong. Fix it."😖
So I went looking.

The UK map was fine. The team had captured the current state properly:

Material flow
Information flow
Customer demand
Data boxes
Lead times

The problem wasn't the map. It was the thinking before the map.

A highly capable improvement professional, with decades of experience, had been classifying touch time as value-adding.

Inspection. Moving product. Unpacking. Searching. Holding parts while waiting.
All counted as value. None of it was.

It was waste hiding behind the activity.

And that's the part that should concern leaders.
Not because 42% sounds impressive.

But because every improvement decision, every future-state map, and every investment was built on the wrong understanding of value.

A Value Stream Map doesn't improve a business. It reveals how work really flows.
Only if you correctly separate customer value from everything else can you start designing an effective future state based on that value.

Too many future-state maps become lists of improvement projects or someone's favourite initiative.

Instead, I believe they should answer questions around three key areas:

1️⃣ Customer Value: What does the customer value, and what is the best strategy to serve them?

2️⃣ Flow: How do we connect activities in flow, moving from one value-adding step to the next?

3️⃣ Scheduling: Which single point in the value stream should we schedule, and how will we cycle through the mix? This is the one most teams overlook, and it's the real game-changer.

Get those questions right, and the improvement plan shapes itself.
Get the definition of value wrong.....and waste can hide in plain sight for years.

Question: What's the highest percentage of value-added activity you've seen on a Value Stream Map?

25/06/2026

Before You Map a Value Stream

Everyone wants to map a value stream.

Almost nobody is ready to.

The brown paper goes up. Sticky notes appear. A current state, a future state, and an action plan are created.

Three months later, the map is still on the wall.

The action plan isn't.

That's not a Value Stream Mapping problem.
It's an improvement strategy problem.

The best Value Stream Mapping books all agree on one thing: the workshop isn't the start of the journey, it's the middle. Most organisations jump straight there.
Before you map, ask six questions:

1. Is the business VSM ready? Value Stream Mapping exposes improvement opportunities, but if the process is unstable or incapable, a different improvement strategy will deliver greater results first.

2. Are you mapping the right value stream? Choose the one linked to business strategy or to flow, not the noisiest problem.

3. Have you done the pre-work? Understand demand, current performance and the real process before drawing a map.

4. Have you got the right people? Process owners, decision-makers and a facilitator prepared to challenge the room.

5. How will you design the future state? Build it from data and a deep understanding of value and flow - not by voting on sticky notes or driving random acts of improvement.

6. How will you sustain it? The workshop doesn't deliver results. Leadership routines do.

Miss any of these six, and you haven't mapped a value stream.

You've decorated a wall.

Value Stream Mapping isn't the improvement strategy.

It's one step in a leader-led continuous improvement strategy.

How does your organisation decide when it's ready to map a value stream?

19/06/2026

🟢 The workshop isn't where value stream mapping goes wrong.
This week I was on-site, closer to home in Wales, doing the work most people skip

Before a VSM workshop even starts.
Validate scope.
Right people in the room.
Information ready.
Roles and responsibilities clear.
Check that the business are VSM ready

Skip this and here's what happens mid-workshop:
- Stakeholders aren't aligned on the objective.
- The right people aren't there.
- You've mapped the wrong value stream.
- The team sits around waiting for someone to dig up data.
- Leadership doesn't show up.
- The future state gets built on opinion (chasing waste instead of value flow).
- Spent the time using VSM to highlight problems to solve that you’ve already known about.

None of that is a workshop problem. It's a prep problem.
Get the prep right, and the workshop will be off to a flying start.

What's the one thing you've seen sink a VSM workshop before it even started?

18/06/2026

🟢🏅 Big businesses aren't always the Lean exemplars they're made out to be.
I was recently at a major industry event showcasing a recognised leader in its field.
The agenda looked interesting:
• Their improvement approach
• Kaizen results
• Leadership engagement
• Site tour
• Q&A

The room was full of sector leaders, improvement professionals, and association heads.
Then came the applause. And the tour.

One senior leader I spoke to afterwards saw it differently.
He runs a mature operation himself. But still came hoping to learn something.
He didn't.

Experts' teaching tools. Not leaders building capability, or sharing the struggles they actually had to overcome.

The manufacturing process that the room had viewed with envy was full of waiting, movement, and inspection. Value-adding activity was hard to find.

Kaizen events treated like six-month projects. With Awards at the end.

Turned out most of the audience were mid and junior-level employees. Senior leaders were back in the office. In meetings.

Activity and excellence aren't the same thing.

Next time you're on a site visit, don't just listen.
Look for work flowing from one value-adding step to the next.
The visual management that connects performance to problems, and problems to action.
For leaders coaching. Not watching.

That's how you know it's embedded.

Not because someone says so.
Because you can see it.

11/06/2026

Super excited to be speaking at the 2026 Lean Solutions Summit — September 15–17, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Theme this year: Better Together: People + Innovation. Leaders and change-makers who understand that innovation only lasts when people and practical systems are behind it. Good room to be in.

My session: A Leader's Guide to Making Lean & Continuous Improvement Work.
One truth drives the whole thing —

Most Lean transformations don't fail. They fade.
The routines stop. Focus drifts. Same problems return. And its not the fault of the people or the tools, it’s that the management system and routines never changed.

We'll get into:
• Why CI programmes produce activity, not impact
• Tool-led vs system-led improvement
• What leaders actually need to do differently
• How to know your teams are working on the right things

If you're attending, I have a code for $100 off your ticket. Message me.

Address

Cardiff

Website

https://discover.makingleanwork.org/three-key-mistakes/, http://www.makingleanwork.org/

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