Gemba Academy

What Is a Milk Run?

By Jon Miller - July 19th, 2021

The milk run is a method for connecting material movement between multiple sources and a storage location nearer to the point of use or processing. The name comes from a practice in the dairy industry. A tanker truck makes rounds to

Hypotheses from Hansei in Odd Times

By Jon Miller - July 12th, 2021

The Independence Day weekend has turned into sort of a second holiday of thanksgiving for me. It’s a chance to appreciate improving weather, fresh produce, and a moment to reflect on the last half-year. For the past decade or

Reconstructing Degraded Processes and a Yearning for Darkness

By Kevin Meyer - July 9th, 2021

Yesterday I returned from almost two weeks in Iceland, which was tacked on to two weeks exploring Maine. Nearly a month away from the home and office, and our first international trip in well over a year. We had a fantastic time with g

What Problem Are You Trying to Solve?

By Ron Pereira - July 2nd, 2021

One of my responsibilities here at Gemba Academy is to coach our Black Belt and Master Black Belt candidates. And, without question, the most common question I ask during the project selection phase of the journey is “What proble

The Five Steps to Getting Better at Anything

By Jon Miller - June 28th, 2021

Jerry Seinfeld is an immensely successful comedian. He has achieved fame and fortune through his skill at making funny observations about everyday things. An Inc. magazine article asks him why he still works so hard and receives a simp

Learning from a Blogging Experiment Failure

By Jon Miller - June 21st, 2021

We’re about ten weeks into running an experiment in blog post writing. The purpose is to be less deadline-driven, allow time for quality checks and make the writing process less of a weekly struggle. It was going well until this week

Respect for Soft Skills

By Jon Miller - June 14th, 2021

In lean circles we talk a lot about respect for people. Along with continuous improvement, it’s one of two core elements of the Toyota Way brand of lean thinking. In contrast to the tools and techniques of continuous improvement,

How to Think Long Term

By Jon Miller - June 7th, 2021

One of the 14 Toyota Way principles is to think long term. In fact, it’s the first on the list. What does it mean exactly to base decisions on the long term, in the context of lean management? Reading carefully, we can see that n

The Surprisingly Positive Power of Deception

By Jon Miller - May 31st, 2021

Recently I wanted to persuade an acquaintance to try something. It was a simple solution that I was pretty sure would work for them. There was very little practical downside. And yet as anyone who has ever tried to present a solution t

The Value of Lean Certifications

By Steve Kane - May 28th, 2021

It’s often argued that certifications are not required to practice Lean. This is absolutely true. Lean and other continuous improvement methods can and should be practiced by anyone in any organization without a certification or

Roundabout Lessons on Scaling Lean Solutions

By Jon Miller - May 24th, 2021

Traffic roundabouts are one of my favorite flow management devices. There is a physical WIP limit. They’re visual. Look to the left for oncoming traffic, if there is a gap, this is the “pull signal.” No oncoming car in the ci

How to Solve Hard Problems with Kaizen Events

By Jon Miller - May 17th, 2021

Many people are familiar with kaizen as a philosophy and practice of continuous improvement based on making many small changes repeatedly towards a long-term ideal. Often this takes the form of a creative idea suggestion scheme, a simp

On Learning, Listening, and Wisdom

By Kevin Meyer - May 14th, 2021

I’ve long felt that the single best indicator of leadership success, especially at the executive level, is whether the person is a voracious learner. Bonus points if the person intentionally looks for opportunities to learn new

Lessons from Twelve Years in Pursuit of Zero

By Jon Miller - May 10th, 2021

We often see a visual display of the safety performance metric “days since lost time incident” in workplaces. It’s common where the job requires physical labor or where there is injury risk. The more days, or the long

What Is Agile Kanban?

By Ron Pereira - May 7th, 2021

We’re excited to announce the release of our initial Introduction to Agile Kanban course. We have several more Agile Kanban related courses in the works but decided to release this first course now. What follows is the text from

How to Save the World Using Gantt Charts

By Jon Miller - May 3rd, 2021

There are many tools available to project managers for coordinating work and keeping their projects on schedule. Small and simple projects may use task lists or spreadsheets to track the status of work items. Teams working on longer te

How to Avoid Zoom Fatigue

By Jon Miller - April 26th, 2021

Academics, executives, and mental health professionals are growing aware of something called Zoom fatigue. Zoom is a popular brand of online video chat, but the phenomena is not limited to that platform. People are reporting tiredness,

Break the Habit of Breaking Good Habits

By Steve Kane - April 23rd, 2021

There are countless books, YouTube videos, and other media on topic of building good habits and breaking bad ones. So often the desire to change our ways comes light because of our realization that a problem exists. We learn and we fin

Going Out of Our Minds with Lean Thinking

By Jon Miller - April 19th, 2021

The expression, “walk a mile in their shoes before judging them,” means gaining understanding or empathy for another person’s experience or point of view. It’s mainly a mental exercise. But there are many practical

The Coaching Cycle Is Not a Judgement-Free Zone

By Jon Miller - April 12th, 2021

Planet Fitness famously calls itself a judgement-free zone. This is an effort to combat the image of gyms as aggressive, competitive spaces. Beginners or casual users may not feel as comfortable. We are all beginners at one time, and w

Uncovering New Perspectives

By Kevin Meyer - April 9th, 2021

We often talk about the importance of getting “out of the box” to supposedly free ourselves of bias and be better at making informed decisions and capitalize on new opportunities. In reality, we often just barely ease our

Addressing Toyota Kata’s Counting Problem

By Jon Miller - April 5th, 2021

Toyota Kata is the name Mike Rother gave to the set of routines used at the company to teach and practice scientific thinking. There are two practice patterns, the improvement kata for the learner and the coaching kata for the coach.

The Dichotomy of Continuous Improvement

By Ron Pereira - April 2nd, 2021

Every weekday morning my 14-year-old son and I take the 25-minute drive to his school. Neither one of us are big talkers in the morning so we typically listen to audiobooks to pass the time. The topics of the books we’ve listened

Blog Writing Experiment

By Jon Miller - March 29th, 2021

Since 2003, I’ve been putting my thoughts on kaizen, lean, continuous improvement, and related topics down in blog posts. For the past five years it’s been on a weekly cadence. My deadline is Monday at 4:59 AM Pacific Time.

Did Standardized Work Originate Thousands of Years Ago?

By Steve Kane - March 26th, 2021

Armies around the world and throughout history have many common practices and traditions. One practice, in particular, started thousands of years ago and is deeply rooted in what we today would characterize as Lean practices. This prac

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