Gemba Academy

The Value of Lean Certifications

By Steve Kane - May 28th, 2021

It’s often argued that certifications are not required to practice Lean. This is absolutely true. Lean and other continuous improvement methods can and should be practiced by anyone in any organization without a certification or

Roundabout Lessons on Scaling Lean Solutions

By Jon Miller - May 24th, 2021

Traffic roundabouts are one of my favorite flow management devices. There is a physical WIP limit. They’re visual. Look to the left for oncoming traffic, if there is a gap, this is the “pull signal.” No oncoming car in the ci

How to Solve Hard Problems with Kaizen Events

By Jon Miller - May 17th, 2021

Many people are familiar with kaizen as a philosophy and practice of continuous improvement based on making many small changes repeatedly towards a long-term ideal. Often this takes the form of a creative idea suggestion scheme, a simp

On Learning, Listening, and Wisdom

By Kevin Meyer - May 14th, 2021

I’ve long felt that the single best indicator of leadership success, especially at the executive level, is whether the person is a voracious learner. Bonus points if the person intentionally looks for opportunities to learn new

Lessons from Twelve Years in Pursuit of Zero

By Jon Miller - May 10th, 2021

We often see a visual display of the safety performance metric “days since lost time incident” in workplaces. It’s common where the job requires physical labor or where there is injury risk. The more days, or the long

What Is Agile Kanban?

By Ron Pereira - May 7th, 2021

We’re excited to announce the release of our initial Introduction to Agile Kanban course. We have several more Agile Kanban related courses in the works but decided to release this first course now. What follows is the text from

How to Save the World Using Gantt Charts

By Jon Miller - May 3rd, 2021

There are many tools available to project managers for coordinating work and keeping their projects on schedule. Small and simple projects may use task lists or spreadsheets to track the status of work items. Teams working on longer te

How to Avoid Zoom Fatigue

By Jon Miller - April 26th, 2021

Academics, executives, and mental health professionals are growing aware of something called Zoom fatigue. Zoom is a popular brand of online video chat, but the phenomena is not limited to that platform. People are reporting tiredness,

Break the Habit of Breaking Good Habits

By Steve Kane - April 23rd, 2021

There are countless books, YouTube videos, and other media on topic of building good habits and breaking bad ones. So often the desire to change our ways comes light because of our realization that a problem exists. We learn and we fin

Going Out of Our Minds with Lean Thinking

By Jon Miller - April 19th, 2021

The expression, “walk a mile in their shoes before judging them,” means gaining understanding or empathy for another person’s experience or point of view. It’s mainly a mental exercise. But there are many practical

The Coaching Cycle Is Not a Judgement-Free Zone

By Jon Miller - April 12th, 2021

Planet Fitness famously calls itself a judgement-free zone. This is an effort to combat the image of gyms as aggressive, competitive spaces. Beginners or casual users may not feel as comfortable. We are all beginners at one time, and w

Uncovering New Perspectives

By Kevin Meyer - April 9th, 2021

We often talk about the importance of getting “out of the box” to supposedly free ourselves of bias and be better at making informed decisions and capitalize on new opportunities. In reality, we often just barely ease our

Addressing Toyota Kata’s Counting Problem

By Jon Miller - April 5th, 2021

Toyota Kata is the name Mike Rother gave to the set of routines used at the company to teach and practice scientific thinking. There are two practice patterns, the improvement kata for the learner and the coaching kata for the coach.

The Dichotomy of Continuous Improvement

By Ron Pereira - April 2nd, 2021

Every weekday morning my 14-year-old son and I take the 25-minute drive to his school. Neither one of us are big talkers in the morning so we typically listen to audiobooks to pass the time. The topics of the books we’ve listened

Blog Writing Experiment

By Jon Miller - March 29th, 2021

Since 2003, I’ve been putting my thoughts on kaizen, lean, continuous improvement, and related topics down in blog posts. For the past five years it’s been on a weekly cadence. My deadline is Monday at 4:59 AM Pacific Time.

Did Standardized Work Originate Thousands of Years Ago?

By Steve Kane - March 26th, 2021

Armies around the world and throughout history have many common practices and traditions. One practice, in particular, started thousands of years ago and is deeply rooted in what we today would characterize as Lean practices. This prac

Seven Policy Questions for Shaping a Lean Future

By Jon Miller - March 22nd, 2021

A Scientific American article from November 2020 looked ahead to how the election would shape the future of the U.S. and the world. The article asked seven questions related to how the election’s outcome would affect policies in

When to Stop the Coaching Conversation

By Jon Miller - March 15th, 2021

One of the challenges of being an effective coach is knowing when to stop coaching. After sharing some insight or giving a piece of advice that lands well, it’s natural for a coach to feel good. If we’re not careful, this f

Neuroscience Reframes Aging

By Kevin Meyer - March 12th, 2021

Exactly a year ago my wife and I were in Hawaii and I was trading emails back and forth with a few colleagues speculating on the impact of the virus on our businesses, conferences, and lives. We returned to California the day before

How to Shape Lean Leadership Culture Through Daily Management

By Jon Miller - March 8th, 2021

At the most basic level, a daily management system enables us to know each day whether we are on-track or off-track to meeting our goals. It provides a structure to expose problems and take corrective action. The system includes medium

Lessons Learned From a Flooded Office

By Ron Pereira - March 5th, 2021

As I pulled into the Gemba Academy parking lot Thursday morning, February 18th, I noticed something strange…there was ice everywhere. Now, as you may have heard, Texas was recently blasted with some crazy cold temperatures which

Better Lean Leadership through Novice Learning

By Jon Miller - March 1st, 2021

I read an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal titled, How to Teach Professors Humility? Hand Them a Rubik’s Cube. Professors at Furman and Denison Universities took on a challenge over a six-week winter break. They had to

Coaches Have Obstacles Too

By Steve Kane - February 26th, 2021

The purpose of coaching is to help people get from where they are to where they want to be. It’s a process of inquiry that provides clear structure to thinking that, ideally, diminishes uncertainty by exposing obstacles and illum

Three Things to Stop and Start Doing for Better Lean Coaching

By Jon Miller - February 22nd, 2021

The act of lean coaching covers a broad range of formal and informal roles. We see lean coaching between managers on a gemba walk, a consultant overseeing kaizen teams, a kata coach and an IK learner, a black belt mentoring a green bel

Five Helpful Favorite Phrases for Continuous Improvement Beginners

By Jon Miller - February 15th, 2021

The topic of continuous improvement is broad and deep. It’s easy for beginners to get overwhelmed by the variety of methods, tools and practices available. Even after grasping the technical jargon and settling on a particular app

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