Three Breakout Rooms, One Unplanned Answer: Improvement Has a Language Problem

Eighteen people met on Zoom on August 4 to get ready for the California Improvement Summit. We split them into three rooms with three different prompts and no way to hear each other. All three came back talking about words.

That was not on the agenda, and a week of email later it is still the most interesting thing that happened.

Its about language

This was the first of four pre-work options for the Summit, held at the Octagon Barn in San Luis Obispo from August 30 to September 1. The question anchoring all of it: how do we make continuous improvement Easier, Better, and Faster — with humanity — across California's organizations over the next decade? One hour, three prompts: what you actually see from your gemba; whether improvement as we practice it fits what California is up against; and what you would try if you set aside how this work is normally done. Current state only.

The finding nobody planned

Beau Keyte listened to the Abundance podcast, the only pre-work option neutral to where you live. He liked it, and it bothered him. "Lean could have found that as easily as they did. But we wouldn't have called it abundance. Which makes me wonder, what should we have called it?" All the book describes, he said, is removing constraints upstream. "That's what we do, naturally, and we don't speak the right language to get the traction we need."

His room turned that into standing questions, and Dana Miller's version is the sharpest: what is the common business language of improvement, and how do we use it to create a shared understanding of the change needed? A different room asked whether Lean, Agile, and Kanban should simply be called one thing. Jim Benson: "all religions basically say be nice to each other, except for other religions. It's like, just don't work like an idiot." Skylar Olsen: "that's really what Lean is. Just listen."

The week after the session produced the first concrete answer. Stephen Shortell: "Regarding language, I suggest performance improvement. Everyone can relate to that."

Ten problems, ten people, no overlap

Asked what California should work on, the group named ten arenas — competitiveness, healthcare, housing, homelessness, higher education, water and energy, public pensions, downtown recovery, wildfire cost, agriculture. No two people named the same one. Everyone reached for the sector they know.

Michael Bremer reframed the whole exercise. "Our goal shouldn't be to solve California's biggest problems. Our goal should be to identify a problem where improvement thinking can make a meaningful difference, and then engage the people responsible for that work." His filter for a candidate: important enough that success would matter to California, complex enough that improvement thinking shows a different way forward, and within the influence of the people we can realistically engage.

What we could not settle

The room split on focus, and so did the host. David Beaumont argued for one high-leverage area, driven from the top. Eric Olsen pushed back: "focus is a bit of a trap for us in the improvement community. We're not ready to focus. I could pick something to improve, but how do you know it's the right thing?"

Sponsorship had the same shape. Jim Benson described a state government moving faster than any client he has worked with, and traced it to one forward-thinking CIO who knows that when he leaves, it is easily undone. Dana Miller watched a change in leadership erase a university program. Cathy O'Sullivan offered the only way out anyone proposed: you need a champion at the top, "but maybe that could also be somewhat manufactured." Nobody said how.

And a conflict inside our own principles: we say no participation, no buy-in. But when everybody participates, everybody gets a veto.

What we are carrying in

Not answers. Three people independently asked what success at the Summit would look like, which makes it a finding rather than a scheduling problem. The host's position is to stay as high as we can for as long as we can, and find the real question before choosing a problem. Ten tensions came out of all this, each with both poles argued by a named person. They are the working document for August.

Three more pre-work options are running. If any of these questions is one you have been chewing on, we would rather argue with you than agree with each other. The two-page summary, with links to the full record and the tension map, is here 

Knowledge Map

• Process Keywords

  • Liberating Structures; Impromptu Networking; Open Space; gemba walk; A3 thinking; current state; value stream selection; product/process matrix; Toyota Kata; standard work; pull-based improvement; conversation capture.

• Context Keywords

  • Improvement jargon nobody outside the practice understands; competing method brands; the executive sponsor leaves and the program dies; not knowing what to work on first; cross-agency and cross-department territoriality; participation that becomes veto power; proving improvement pays without a clean financial story.

• Application Triggers

  • If your improvement program depends on one sponsor, then start now on how it survives that person leaving. If a discussion keeps drifting into generalities, then pick one product, customer, or value stream as the tie-breaker case. If your language is not landing with leadership, then borrow theirs before asking them to learn yours. If everyone gets a seat and nothing moves, then look for the veto hiding inside participation. If you are asking people what to improve, then ask what makes a bad day rather than what is inefficient.

• Related Continuous-Improvement Themes

  • Respect for people as a test of a countermeasure, not a slogan; frontline daily improvement versus a central improvement office; learning organizations and the baseline required to learn; humor and humanity as adoption mechanisms; AI in improvement work, and its limits.

    
    

Developed from the recordings, chat, Miro board, and email thread of the August 4 pre-work session, corrected by the participants, and synthesized with Claude AI assistance. Editorial contributions by Michael Bremer, Beau Keyte, David Belson, Stephen Shortell, Cathy O'Sullivan, Lori Serna, Dana Miller, and David Beaumont. Published by Central Coast Lean. Corrections and pushback: eric.o@centralcoastlean.org (Link: mailto:eric.o@centralcoastlean.org — apply to the address only)