KaiNexus: Continuous Improvement, Leadership, and More

Continuous improvement work creates real value. Most of that value never reaches executives in a form they can trust.View slides and moreIn this recorded webinar, Jeff Roussel, Chief Revenue Officer at KaiNexus, argues that CI does not have an impact problem. It has a translation problem. Only about 28 percent of the improvements tracked in KaiNexus show a direct, visible financial impact. So when an executive asks what the organization is actually getting from all this work, the answer usually arrives as a spreadsheet, a set of caveats about data quality, and a week of effort. That does not build confidence.Jeff walks through what changes when improvement work gets described in the language leaders already use. Examples include a hospital system that documented $137 million in savings after reserving operating rooms for emergency cases and adjusting scheduling patterns, a global mining company with roughly 284,000 improvements and $178 million in impact across 12,000 employees, and a fintech company that went from $4.5 million to $15 million in documented savings in a year after deciding that if an improvement was not in the system, it did not count.He also offers a structure for the next funding conversation. Start with the pain. Move to the impact on a metric leadership already cares about. Then make a focused ask, such as a 90-day pilot with one team and one metric, rather than asking to transform the whole program.Mark Graban hosts and joins Jeff for an extended Q&A on:Balancing short-term results against long-term thinkingWhether a CI program should fund itself beyond startup costsHow to handle soft benefits like engagement, morale, and quality without inflating the numbersHow to get the meeting when executives are not giving you their timeWhy the problem with spreadsheets is usually trust, not the spreadsheetsJeff offered to help listeners think through their own business case, whether or not software is part of the conversation: [email protected] than 100 free recorded webinars: https://www.kainexus.com/webinarsContinuous improvement blog: https://blog.kainexus.comPodcast: https://www.kainexus.com/podcast

Why do strong continuous improvement programs sometimes struggle to secure funding?In this preview of an upcoming KaiNexus webinar, Mark Graban talks with presenter Jeff Roussel, Chief Revenue Officer at KaiNexus, about a common problem: CI leaders often describe operational challenges in language that does not connect with the priorities executives are prepared to fund.Jeff explains why continuous improvement should be positioned not merely as a way to manage projects or count ideas, but as a business outcome engine that supports the organization’s mission and strategic goals.They also discuss:Why CI programs can be valuable yet still fail to gain executive supportHow to translate improvement needs into organizational prioritiesConnecting CI work to safety, quality, customer satisfaction, engagement, and financial resultsPractical ways to reframe the case for investmentThe full webinar, “Why Great CI Programs Don’t Get Funded—and What to Do About It,” will be presented live on Wednesday, July 22, 2026, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern.Register or watch the recording afterward at https://info.kainexus.com/jeff-roussel-continuous-improvement-funding-webinar

Every process problem is a customer problem in disguise. CI teams are good at finding waste, reducing variation, and improving flow. Customers experience those same breakdowns as uncertainty, frustration, effort, and broken trust.Slides, the resource list, and the full recording are on the episode page: https://www.kainexus.com/customer-signals-continuous-improvement-webinarThis episode is the audio from a recent session of the KaiNexus Continuous Improvement Webinar Series. Annette Behrensmeyer and Volker Probst of Resonance Growth Partners make the case for a second lens on improvement work: the customer signals already hiding inside your operational data. Repeat contacts, transfers, escalations, and frontline observations almost always show up before a survey score moves or a complaint lands. This isn't about replacing voice of the customer or launching another program. It's about enriching the signals you already use to decide what to work on next.In this conversation:Why solicited feedback (surveys, interviews) arrives late and carries an effort tax, and where unsolicited signals fill the gapA three-step approach to connect customer signals to your improvement system, plus a simple way to weigh customer value against business valueHow a 32-bed med-surg unit turned its daily huddle into a 15-minute patient signal huddle and compressed a 60-to-90-day feedback loop into daysHow a med tech company cut call volume by 30%+, saved over $10M in shipping cost, and recovered $20M+ in annual recurring revenue by making an opaque process visibleFour things any CI leader can start on this weekAbout the guestsAnnette Behrensmeyer and Volker Probst are managing partners at Resonance Growth Partners, where they help organizations connect customer understanding, employee insight, and business performance. Annette is a Forrester-certified CX professional with more than a decade designing enterprise CX strategies and feedback-to-action operating models. Volker brings more than 25 years turning customer insight into action at enterprise scale across CX and operational excellence leadership. Hosted by Mark Graban, senior advisor at KaiNexus.

Voice of Customer has been a fixture in Lean and Six Sigma for decades, but the word "voice" carries a hidden assumption: that the customer has to do something -- answer a survey, write an email, lift a finger -- before you learn anything. Most of the time they don't, and you're left improving in the dark.In this preview of our next Continuous Improvement Webinar, host Mark Graban talks with Annette Behrensmeyer and Volker Probst, managing partners at Resonance Growth Partners, about a broader idea: customer signals. These include the unsolicited, behavior-based indicators customers send all the time without being asked -- and the operational data that often reveals more than a survey ever could.The conversation gets at a problem every CI leader knows: the gap between what customers say and what they do. Volker shares a story from when his wife was hospitalized while pregnant with twins, and a nurse asked her daily to fill out a survey and award a perfect score -- a built-in bias that tells you almost nothing about the actual experience. The better question is what behaviors and operational indicators reveal about how an experience really went, and what an organization should fix because of it.The full webinar, Beyond the Voice of Customer: How Richer Customer Signals Can Improve Continuous Improvement, airs live Thursday, June 18 at 1:00 pm ET. There's relevant material here for manufacturing, service businesses, and healthcare leaders thinking about voice of the patient. Register at the link below, bring your questions for the live Q&A, or catch the recording here in the feed and on YouTube afterward.Register: https://info.kainexus.com/webinar-customer-signals-continuous-improvement

Improvement efforts stall for reasons every CI practitioner knows by heart: unclear problem statements, missing data, inconsistent teams, rejected countermeasures. Anne Frewin argues those are symptoms. The root cause is the environment leaders create -- and Gallup's data backs her up: 70% of team engagement comes down to the manager.In this episode, recorded as part of the KaiNexus Continuous Improvement Webinar Series, Anne walks host Mark Graban through her LEAD model -- four leadership mindsets that build the psychological safety improvement work depends on. For each one, she offers a single behavior you can put to work right away:Leading with courage means talking about problems, not just making them visible -- moving teams from firefighting to "smelling the smoke." Embodying trust means going to Gemba with real curiosity: standing still, observing, listening to tone as much as words. Anchoring in clarity means communicating so it sticks -- frequent, visual, purposeful, two-way. Driving improvement means inviting ideas and letting people fix what bugs them, using three simple guardrails: Is it safe? Does everyone who needs to know, know? Can it be undone?Anne also makes the case for treating employees as a key stakeholder alongside owners and customers, and shows what changes when you do. Engaged organizations see 63% fewer safety incidents, 21% lower turnover, 32% fewer defects, and 23% higher profitability.The conversation continues into a wide-ranging Q&A on writing better problem statements, creating space for people to surface problems without fear, the limits of ROI thinking, and the hard work of coaching managers who rose through the ranks by being the boss.Anne Frewin is a speaker, coach, and facilitator, and the founder of Employee Centric Leadership LLC. She has more than 15 years of experience implementing Lean principles across healthcare, biomedical, manufacturing, and professional services.Watch the video, view the slides, and read the full recapBrowse 100+ free recorded webinarsTips, articles, and case studies on leadership and continuous improvementLearn more about KaiNexus

Most continuous improvement programs don't stall because the strategy is wrong or the tools are missing. They stall because of what leaders do, or don't do, every day.In this short preview, host Mark Graban talks with Anne Frewin about her upcoming KaiNexus webinar, Every Moment Matters: How Leadership Behaviors Shape Results Every Day, airing live on Tuesday, May 26 at 1 pm Eastern.Anne walks through the LEAD model she'll cover in the session:Lead with courageEmbody trustAnchor in clarityDrive improvementFor each, she'll share a specific behavior attendees can put to use the next day. The session applies whether you lead in healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, government, or nonprofits -- and whether you hold a formal title or lead informally.Anne is a speaker, coach, facilitator, and founder of Employee Centric Leadership, LLC. She brings more than 15 years of Lean experience across healthcare, biomedical, manufacturing, and professional services, along with a finance background and master's degrees in healthcare administration and organizational leadership.Register for the live session (the recording will also be available):https://info.kainexus.com/webinar-anne-frewin-leadershipConnect with Anne:https://www.linkedin.com/in/annefrewin/https://employeecentricleadership.org/More KaiNexus webinars:https://www.kainexus.com/webinarsSee KaiNexus in action:https://www.kainexus.com/continuous-improvement-software/kainexus/kainexus-demo-overview

The blog post James Womack and Dan Jones are the founders of the Lean Enterprise Institute and the Lean Enterprise Academy (UK), respectively. Their book, Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation, is considered by some to be the bible of Lean Manufacturing. It was initially published in 1996 based on their in-depth study of Toyota’s fabled Toyota Production System (TPS). Womack and Jones realized that every business output results from a process. Process thinking in operations management requires leaders and workers to view the organization as a set of related processes that work together for a common goal rather than a group of departments supporting a specific function.These ideas are widely used by organizations in every sector to better design, track, and optimize business operations. Companies have not done away with functional departments. Instead, they view the work departments do differently. Departments don't exist on their terms. Each receives inputs from other functions and provides outputs that other departments must consume to complete their work. In short, each function or person contributes to one or more business processes. So, instead of managing departments, process thinking means managing entire operations. A process might move through a series of teams or functions, each with its requirements, but the purpose of each one is to create value for the customer, which is what matters.

I doubt that you are still using index cards to organize your contacts, but your approach to huddle boards may be just as outdated. In the same way that an electronic contact database has a ton of advantages over a Rolodex, digital huddle boards offer valuable benefits that paper notes pinned to a poster on the wall. Here are the top reasons to consider an upgrade.

Lean organizations target 8 types of waste in an effort to create the perfect flow of value to the customer. Ideally, no resources are used unnecessarily and every task contributes something for which customers are willing to pay. Of course, achieving this is much more challenging than just saying it. That is why a set of Lean tools and techniques have been developed to aid Leaders who embark on this journey. We would argue that software designed to support this type of improvement is crucial to success.

If you are considering investing in strategy deployment software to support your organization's efforts to achieve your most important objectives, we congratulate you. Too many leaders talk a big game when it comes to strategy, but fail to provide the company with the tools and information necessary to effectively carry it out. (Here’s a good example of what can go wrong.) There are a lot of systems out there that could be sold as a strategy deployment solution. You can find everything from glorified spreadsheets to purpose-built improvement platforms. We have had the chance to chat with lots of folks who have been through the selection and implementation process, so we thought it would be useful to share a few of the features that make all of the difference.