Twenty-Seven Practitioners, a Day and a Half, and the One Thing We Never Named
Updated: 4 days ago
Narrative Rev 5 · 15Sep26 · in step with Summit A3 Draft Rev 7 · 15Sep26
The question was asked out loud before anyone had a marker in their hand: after a lifetime of this work, shouldn't we be able to see the needle move?
Twenty-seven improvement people had come to the Milking Parlor at the Octagon Barn in San Luis Obispo — a hundred-year-old dairy barn, now an event space — for the California Improvement Summit 2026. Dana Miller, looking at the photographs afterwards, said the place read to her less like an ivory tower than a monastery: somewhere people are of service, and get recharged enough to go back out into the world. That is about right. Manufacturing, healthcare, higher education, government, consulting. Some had been doing this for forty years. The question in front of them was a larger version of the one above: how do we make continuous improvement easier, better and faster, with humanity, across California over the next decade?
We got further than expected on most of it. One part we never finished, and that unfinished part is the one still teaching us something.
What a working summit looks like
No keynotes. No slides. A day and a half of people at tables, building an A3 on the wall — the one-page problem-to-plan format that runs from background through current state, problem, goals, analysis, countermeasures, plan and follow-up.
The current state came from a SWOT that four Shift-and-Share stations built rather than received, with an online group building the same quadrants in parallel. The problem came out as paradoxes, one pitched by each table, then voted. The winner, at thirteen votes: we have the tools and the techniques, so why don't we have the trust? Goals came from Min Specs. The analysis came from a Conversation Café — three rounds, talking sticks, against one question written in red marker: what prevents us from knocking these out of the park?
Then twenty-five index cards, scored by everyone, and six tables each taking one root cause through what, so what, now what.
What the room found
Two findings landed harder than the rest, and neither was planned.
The first came out of the SWOT. Every strength named was a property of the improvement community itself — good tools, deep expertise, real respect for people. Every weakness sat at the boundary between that community and the organizations it serves: no leadership ownership, no talent pipeline, no clarity on who the customer is. The strengths champion said it while reporting out — this is good within our community, but is it really in our organizations? The only picture anyone drew all day was a circle labelled IMPROVEMENT COMMUNITY, a stressed world outside it, and an arrow pointing in that read be the safe harbor.
The second is what the Café converged on. Not tools. Not techniques. People. And the sharpest version came from the floor: we often sell the method without understanding the goal. Counties and cities publish their plans. We push method. Several tables said, independently, that we do not know what we are solving for.
A third finding arrived after the room went home, on a recording from the threats station, and it is the one people outside this work recognize fastest. Improvement programs are read by the people who have to live with them as the current leader's enthusiasm, not as the way the place works. Someone at that table remembered walking a hospital corridor while the data-management boards were going up, and the facilities worker installing them said, without looking up: this is just the next shiny thing. I'll be taking these down in six months. He is right often enough to be worth listening to. American executive culture expects a new chief executive to leave fingerprints; the contrast that table drew was Toyota, where an incoming CEO adopts the system rather than replacing it. A culture that survives its leader is not a culture the leader installed.
Three moments worth passing on
When it was proposed that AI affinitize the ideas overnight, Beau Keyte of The Keyte Group said it three times in a row — that goes against process. The objection was not that the machine would be wrong. It was that the people who did the thinking would not be in the room when the answer came back. The room re-threaded the analysis by hand instead, and it is stronger for it. Of everything that happened, that is the finding we would most like other groups to steal.
Late on Monday, answering the objection that the room had no customer present, Skylar Olsen of Frolic Community named one: you have a customer, and it is yourselves. Janice Hodge had said out loud that she has no pipeline of people to help build a career in this work. That is a customer sitting right here.
Dana Miller has since put a shape to it that we did not have in the room: an improvement marketplace, where a practitioner can offer services to the state of California, so that California can draw on a community of improvement people rather than hunting for one at a time. That is a customer and a product in one sentence, which is more than the Summit managed.
On Tuesday morning Tyson Heaton of the Lean Enterprise Institute said the quiet thing: these look like solutions searching for a problem. The room had reached countermeasures without ever naming what it was solving. With two hours left, the choice was to protect the two hours. Reasonable on the day, and the right call for the room we had. It is also the first thing on the list now that there is no clock.
That unnamed problem is the honest finding of the Summit, and it is the most useful thing anyone left with.
The comments have started to fill it in. Dana Miller's version is that organizations often are not aware of the problems they have, and that the people inside them are busy surviving — there is no spare attention for making things better, and no shared language for describing what is wrong. Ease that and the problems become visible. The lean answer is to teach people to see waste, and Eric pushed back on his own tradition there: we have used that word for forty years inside our own community, and it is fair to ask whether it has actually made anyone leaner, or whether it only works once you are already one of us. Which is the boundary problem again, arriving from a different direction.
What comes next
Six countermeasure themes came off the walls: marketing and branding, data, implementation practice, leadership alignment, relational capability, and a talent pipeline that starts in high school. A seventh, policy, came from the online group. A white paper is being drafted as the first of a short series, and each of those themes has enough behind it to be its own piece.
Six of the seven still have no owner. That is the honest position, and the cautionary tale we had been telling ourselves about it turns out to need a correction of its own. We have been describing Process Palooza, the improvement conference at UC San Diego, as an effort that grew to nearly a thousand attendees and then stopped when the funding quietly moved elsewhere. The public record says something different. It ran eight times between 2017 and 2025, and its organizers have announced that they are taking a strategic pause to perform some much-needed continuous improvement on the event itself. There is no 2026 event; the programme at UC San Diego continues. The attendance figure has no published source, and we should not have been repeating it.
The point the room was making still stands, and it stands better without the embellishment: nobody had said I will dedicate the ten thousand hours required to make this run. Peer support and real affection for a thing are not a backbone. Somebody has to own it.
So that is where this stands: seven themes, one owner, a problem statement still to be written, and one figure corrected in public because that is what we ask of everyone else. If you would like to help with any of it, the invitation below is a real one.
The A3 itself is open. It is a working draft — Rev 8, dated 15 September — and it still carries the unnamed problem, the empty owner slots and a list of figures we have not yet verified, because that is the honest state of it. You can read and comment on the Summit A3 directly.
Thank you
Twenty-seven people gave a day and a half of real thinking to a question none of us can answer alone, and several rearranged clients, travel and family to be in that barn. The best of what is written above is theirs.
Tricia Baptista · David Beaumont · David Belson · Samson Blackwell · Michael Bremer · Stephen Chun · Ahmed Deif · Chris Ferrier · Scott Gauvin · Keith Inglis · Kristin Kielich · Kevin Meyer · Dana Miller · Steve Mummy · George Noble · Mark Rosenthal · Steve Shortell · Nick Wettlaufer — along with Beau Keyte, Skylar Olsen, Janice Hodge and Tyson Heaton, whose thinking is quoted above.
Four more joined for part of the day and changed what was on the walls when they did: Jamie Bonini of the Toyota Production System Support Center, dialling in from Toronto, whose five prerequisites for improvement that sticks are now in our current-state thinking; Jake Rodgers of the W. Edwards Deming Institute, who reframed selling as building understanding together; Matt Ward of Lime, who carried the online group's SWOT back to the room; and Joe Kane, at the open.
And Dawn Olsen, Scott Marcus, Nathan Fifer and Peter Olson kept the whole thing fed, badged and captured, which is a large part of why the work held together.
Come and argue with us
Central Coast Lean runs a virtual Lean Coffee on the second Wednesday of each month at 10am Pacific, and the Future of People at Work community meets virtually on the second Friday at 8am Pacific. Both are open, both are free, and both are better with people who disagree. If a line above landed — particularly the one about selling the method without understanding the goal — bring it to one of them, or write to eric.o@centralcoastlean.org and say so.
You do not have to have been in the barn. If you work on improvement anywhere in California — in a hospital, a city, a plant, a campus, a county office — the A3 is open for your comment, and the parts that read wrong from where you sit are the parts we most need to hear about. No wordsmithing needed; that's not the sense of what I took away is a complete comment, and commenters are credited. The next Summit will be a better conversation for it.
Knowledge Map
Process keywords
A3 thinking · SWOT built by the room · paradox statements · multi-voting · Min Specs · Conversation Café · 25/10 Crowd Sourcing · What? So what? Now what? · Shift and Share · obeya · countermeasure threads
Context keywords and reader pain points
No strategy for getting better at improving · the improvement team is the first line cut · leadership ownership and authority · no talent pipeline · jargon as a barrier · not knowing who the customer is · selling the method without knowing the goal · fear of visible problems · AI as cognitive surrender
Application triggers
If your improvement office is first to be cut when budgets tighten, then start with the boundary question rather than another tool rollout.
If your team can name its tools but not its customer, then run the SWOT on your own function before you run it on anyone else's.
If you are about to pitch a method, then find the goal the organization has already published and start there.
If you are letting AI summarize a workshop, then keep the people who did the thinking in the room when it comes back.
If you want a pipeline, then look at high schools before you look at hiring.
Related continuous-improvement themes
Respect for people · strategy deployment · psychological safety · sustainment and stickiness · lean in education · improvement in the public sector
This post was developed from the California Improvement Summit 2026 — the Zoom transcripts and chats of 31 August and 1 September 2026, participant recordings from both days, the SWOT-champion notes, photographs of the flip charts and post-it walls, the Miro board, and the Next Steps chart — and synthesized with Claude AI assistance. Both working sessions ran on a single room microphone, so who said what is reconstructed from context; corrections are welcome and will be credited. It is the first of a short series, and it represents ongoing work by Central Coast Lean.
Comments