Lean Blog Interviews: Real-World Lean Leadership Conversations in Healthcare and Beyond

Episode page with video, transcript, and more: https://leanblog.org/551 My guest for Episode #551 of Lean Blog Interviews is Darril Wilburn, a senior partner at Honsha.ORG, a founding partner at niwaki, and a former Toyota team member. Darril joined Toyota’s Kentucky plant in Georgetown in 1999. He led the teaching of The Toyota Way 2001 to the plant’s senior leaders, and he later led the global pilot of Toyota Business Practices. Darril is co-author, with former Toyota leader Hiro Yoshiki, of the new book Courage, Humility, Kaizen: The Three Disciplines of Toyota Leadership. We talk about how the Georgetown plant went from needing to build almost 90% of its capacity just to break even to a much healthier 60%, and what Hiro did to lead that turnaround. Topics include: What really happens when someone pulls the andon cord Building psychological safety with new hires before line-off Respect for humanity, and why it includes challenge “Healthy paranoia” and why Toyota didn’t talk about being number one Toyota’s careful entry into the U.S., from NUMMI to Georgetown No blame: equipping people to succeed instead of blaming them Pulling wisdom out of the masters into curriculum like TBP and FMDS Sending managers back through jishuken to relearn TPS Straight talk instead of spin Hiro, not heroes Balancing formal and informal communication Why every VP’s first A3 was sent back by design Why “doing TPS was never the point”

Counting how many teams run the Agile ceremonies tells you people are doing things. It doesn’t tell you anything got better. Elisabeth Hendrickson and Joel Tosi call that “change theater,” and it’s one of the illusions their new book is built to take apart. My guests for Episode 550 are the co-authors of Signals & Levers: Systems Thinking Tools to Unblock Software Delivery (IT Revolution, September 2026). Elisabeth is the founder of Curious Duck Digital Laboratory, former VP of R&D at Pivotal, and author of Explore It! Joel is co-founder and CTO of Dojo & Co. and co-author of Creating Your Dojo and Coaching for Learning. The book is written for software organizations, but the ideas come from Deming, Shewhart, Argyris, and Donella Meadows, and most of this conversation applies to any leader trying to improve a system. We talk about the three illusions of predictability, progress, and control, and why they tend to show up together. We get into what it means to run “open loop,” changing things without ever checking whether the change worked, and how organizations accidentally create latency by separating strategy from execution. Joel explains why he brought process behavior charts to software teams, and Elisabeth makes the case that story points are an opinion, cycle time is a fact, and doing math on an opinion still leaves you with an opinion. We close on psychological safety: why a defensive organization can score itself high on safety surveys while behaving otherwise, and why you can’t fix fear by telling people to be brave. Full show notes, links, and transcript: https://www.leanblog.org/550 Follow Lean Blog Interviews for more conversations on Lean, leadership, and continuous improvement.

Accounting teams see problems every day. As my returning guest Nick Katko puts it, they fix them, but they don’t necessarily solve them. Nick is president and owner of BMA, a CPA, and the author of The Lean CFO and co-author of Practicing Lean Accounting. His new book, independently published, is Creating a Continuous Improvement System in Accounting. It grew out of coaching two accounting teams in Ohio, and it comes with a companion webpage of checklists, assessments, and short training presentations. We talk about why so many accounting leaders misunderstand continuous improvement, often because it was done to them by someone else in the company. Nick lays out the three parts of the system he teaches: simple PDCA problem solving, daily lean management, and improvement events, in that order. He shares an accounts payable example where a team cut invoice defects from about 43% to 15% after a month of gathering data instead of guessing. We also get into culture and psychological safety. Nick tells the story of a month-end close engagement where the one person who clearly explained the systemic problems was fired between his visits, and why he walked away rather than run it the top-down way leadership wanted. We discuss why psychological safety shifts when a leader walks in or out of the room, why leaders can’t accurately self-assess it, and how a daily problem-solving huddle ended finger-pointing between accounting and purchasing. Full show notes and links: http://leanblog.org/549  Nick’s book: https://link.amazon/B0dcAyu1m  If you find the show useful, please follow and leave a rating or review.

How does a Lean team of 11 people support a management system for 35,000 associates? Emily Swaney, Vice President of Operational Excellence at OhioHealth, explains that the team spends its time developing about 1,500 leaders as problem-solving coaches instead of leading projects. Emily is a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and a graduate of Ohio State's MBOE program. She describes why her team facilitates short kaizen events and then hands the follow-up to process owners. She talks about coaching executives who were still learning not to be heroes, and about "second coaches," including managers who give feedback to hospital presidents on their coaching. We also discuss OhioHealth's five-tier safety huddles, which roughly doubled the number of reported concerns. Leaders close the loop by bringing updates back to the front line during daily protected gemba time, often within hours of when a concern was raised. Emily explains how frontline teams choose their own KPIs from dashboards tied to the balanced scorecard, and what's next, including an associate idea platform and extending the management system into corporate functions. Full show notes and transcript: http://leanblog.org/548  If you find the show useful, please follow and leave a review.

Karen Martin has joined this podcast five times since 2012. For our 20th anniversary series, we pulled together highlights from all five conversations: clarity versus ambiguity, why value stream mapping needs directors and above in the room, the pattern behind claims that Lean is dying, and the three rules of quality at the source. Karen is founder and CEO of TKMG and TKMG Academy, and author of The Outstanding Organization, Value Stream Mapping, and Clarity First, among other books. Episode page with links and more