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...

By the time Central Coast Lean’s July Lean Coffee got underway, there were almost as many AI notetakers logged into the call as there were people. That felt about right for the morning ahead. For the next seventy minutes, whether the topic was people programs, AI adoption, or metrics, the group kept circling one question: what does it take to trust something — a machine, a metric, a claim of impact — enough to act on it? Balance between evidence and insights Central Coast Lean’s Lean Coffee...

We're building the California Improvement Summit without a call for speakers, a keynote lineup, or an open registration page. Instead, everyone who wants a seat answers four questions. Here's why we chose that path, and what the first fifteen sets of answers are teaching us. The context The California Improvement Summit (August 30 – September 1, 2026, at the Octagon Barn in San Luis Obispo) is an invitation-only working session for about thirty practitioners. The central question: how do we...