If you’ve been asked to lead continuous improvement, this scenario may sound familiar: teams are learning Lean methods, projects are underway, and real effort is happening on the frontline, yet senior leadership barely knows what’s going on. Or worse, they “support” the initiative in theory but remain distant in practice.

The sobering truth is most of the time spent on any process is waste. Some estimates are upwards of 95%. We all spend many precious resources like money, time, and effort on a process, but only a small slice of that actually delivers value to the customer.