Lean Enterprise Institute

09/02/2026

Projects delayed because stakeholders asked for additional information at the last minute. Extra unplanned work surfacing right before deadlines. Teams completing tasks on time but still not making real progress.

GE Appliances faced these same challenges on their $80-million next-generation dishwasher program. Decision-Flow Mapping, an LPPD practice tool, made visible the critical decisions teams need to make — and when they needed to make them.

Program Director Alison Seward called it "hands down my favorite obeya tool." The practice helped the team provide better visibility of when they needed decisions, understand dependencies between teams, and drive decision-making to the people closest to the data.

Decision-flow mapping exemplifies the LPPD principle of Understanding before Executing. Instead of rushing to complete tasks, teams first map what decisions must be made to meet project goals, then prioritize work that closes the knowledge gaps blocking those decisions.

Download the free Decision-Flow Mapping template and facilitation guide: https://hubs.li/Q04vz36-0

09/01/2026

Your best problem-solver can't be in two places at once.

When problem-solving lives in a handful of talented people, it doesn't scale. The organizations that improve reliably have made scientific thinking a shared, teachable routine — practiced daily, coached deliberately.

That's what the Improvement Kata & Coaching Kata workshop builds. Three days of live practice on a real process at Hollingsworth in Dearborn, Oct 20–22, led by Beth Carrington. You'll run PDCA against an actual obstacle while a coach watches how you think, then practice coaching someone else through it.

You leave able to do it and to teach it.
Early-bird pricing ends September 30.

Register for the Improvement Kata & Coaching Kata workshop
https://hubs.li/Q04vy_qS0

08/31/2026

The organizations that sustain lean transformation share a trait that rarely shows up in case studies.

They stopped managing problems and started building systems to surface them.

Managing problems means fixing what breaks. Building a system means creating the daily conditions where problems cannot stay hidden — and where the people closest to the work have a structured way to raise them.

The gap between those two things is where most lean efforts stall.

The 2027 Lean Summit in Los Angeles is built around practitioners who closed that gap. March 16-17.

👉 Learn more: https://hubs.li/Q04vyNb70

08/28/2026

Walking into a room full of lean practitioners for the first time can feel like showing up to a conversation that started without you.

The 2027 Lean Summit Ambassador Program exists to fix that.

First-time attendees can opt in during registration to be paired with a past Summit participant — someone who will reach out before the event, meet you at the Welcome Reception, and help you find your footing in the room.

If you have attended before and want to give something back, you can sign up as an ambassador. No ongoing commitment. One person helping another get started on the right foot.

The lean community is the reason most people keep coming back. The Ambassador Program is how that community deliberately grows.

Sign up during registration. March 16-17, Los Angeles.
https://hubs.li/Q04vrVT20

08/27/2026

In Part 2 of the Deployed or Developed series, Tyson Heaton argues that the forward deployed engineer is the newest version of a management move that runs back to Frederick Taylor: study the expert, encode the method, and hand it to a central team.

Heaton traces the pattern from the stopwatch through business process reengineering to the employee telemetry that surfaced at Meta this spring, then turns to the one experiment that went the other way. Training Within Industry reached 16,500 plants in five years and largely disappeared, persisting only where it was built into a permanent management system rather than bolted on. Toyota built that capability into the team leader, next to the work, and the article closes on a recent Miyoshi plant case that shows the same principle operating in an AI deployment.

The through line for leaders is a question about investment. Whether a central function exists is never the issue. Whether it exists to enable the people doing the work is.

Read Part 2 in The Lean Post.

Renting expertise or building it is a century-old choice, and only one version ever compounded. Part 2 of Deployed or Developed examines why it did.

08/26/2026

The same problems keep coming back. Different week, same fire.

When that happens, it's rarely because people aren't trying hard enough. It's usually because problem-solving lives in a few experts' heads instead of in a routine everyone can practice.

That's what the Improvement Kata and Coaching Kata are built for.

The Improvement Kata gives individuals a four-step routine:

1. set a challenge
2. grasp the current condition
3. establish a two-week target
4. run experiments to get there

The Coaching Kata gives leaders five questions to guide that thinking — reinforcing PDCA as a daily habit instead of a once-a-year event.

Practiced together, they turn scientific problem-solving into something your whole organization does by default.

LEI master coach Beth Carrington wrote a plain-language introduction to both, including the beginner mistakes she sees most often after years in the gemba.

Want a copy?
https://hubs.li/Q04vr7t10

08/26/2026

Call for 2027 Lean Summit speaker proposals!

The submission window stays open through September. But the sooner a proposal is in, the more review time it gets.

If your organization has a transformation story — real numbers, real obstacles, real outcomes — this is the room for it.

Submission link is in the first comment below ⬇️

08/25/2026

Your team can define every lean tool. Can they run one when the process is messy?

The gap between understanding a lean method and being able to run it — when the process is messy and the answer isn't obvious — is where most improvement stalls. Capability is a skill, and skills are built by doing the work with someone coaching how you think.

This fall we're running three practice-based workshops, grouped as the Fall Practitioner Series. Each puts you in a real or simulated process with an expert coach beside you:

- Lean AI Basics — online, Sept 15 & 22 or Oct 6 & 13
https://hubs.li/Q04vggNN0

- Improvement Kata & Coaching Kata — Dearborn, MI, Oct 20–22
https://hubs.li/Q04vgn0Q0

- InBox Lean Office Kaizen Simulation — Rochester, MI, Oct 28
https://hubs.li/Q04vglSV0

Pick the skill your team needs. A workshop is a starting point, not the finish line.

08/24/2026

"Agent" has become the most-used, least-defined word in enterprise AI.

Organizations are deploying digital workers faster than they're designing the systems to govern and improve them. But the hard part was never the technology. It's redesigning the enterprise around a workforce that's now part human, part digital.

That's Lean work. Systems thinking, operating model design, governance, continuous improvement — the capabilities that optimized human work can now orchestrate human and digital work together.

August 26: Sandeep Chennikara (HUB International) and Steve Pereira on agentic automation as an enterprise design challenge, and why not every AI solution deserves the "agent" label.

Part of the Lean Into AI series — a collaboration across nine improvement organizations, including LEI, Shingo, TSSC, and Ohio State's COE.

Where does the real competitive advantage in AI actually live? Probably not where most companies are looking.

Full details and free registration for Lean Into AI: Designing Organizations for Agentic Automation → https://hubs.li/Q04v4QG00

08/24/2026

200,000 implemented frontline ideas.

From a health system that was close to financial default a decade ago.
In this clip from the 2026 Lean Summit, UMass Memorial Health CEO Dr. Eric Dickson explains why the number matters less than the insight behind it.

Watch the full keynote — how UMass built the management system that produced those results.

📹 https://hubs.li/Q04t-XTm0