Episodes

  • Past, Present, and Future of Lean and AI

    Past, Present, and Future of Lean and AI
    Jul 8 2026
    Gene Kim, DevOps leader and co-author of Wiring the Winning Organization, joins Tyson Heaton, LEI Executive Director of LeanTech/AI, and Art Smalley, Toyota veteran and LEI advisor, for a lively, enlightening, and wide-ranging conversation about artificial intelligence. They discuss how AI is forever changing the work of individuals and organizations, and explore the good, bad, and ugly of AI today and tomorrow. One thing they all agree on: the use of AI is picking up, even among lean practitioners. Up to 80% of people in the lean community I suspect still have little to no understanding of AI (“What’s a model?”), estimates Art. But there are examples that the other 20% across industries have started running with it. Tyson mentions, “incendiary events,” like an interaction with a hackathon, that are fueling some of this momentum as individuals return to their work with new capabilities and an appreciation for the technology. “I've coded with chief medical officers, chief science officers, CEOs, CFOs, people in like revenue cycle management and healthcare,” says Gene. “And just to see these people all solving problems by themselves, you know, as they're using coding agents. It's just amazing to see.” Discussion highlights from this often-amusing podcast include: AI finds things that humans alone will not: At a personal and corporate level, AI is uniquely useful at analyzing and finding desired information in any form (data, images, etc.) within unstructured data, says Art. “One of the big angles of this LLM play into functions out outside of ops — whether you're in purchasing HR, legal, finance ,ops, whatever — they're all sitting on mountains of unstructured data... Apple, of all companies, has this problem, too. There's unstructured data, structured data, and types, and suddenly we now have a way to ingest a lot of that and make it searchable in a way that was not before.” Like lean standardization, AI removes waste from work that can open space for creativity: “Folks who are new to lean and standardization, they see a standard as potentially restrictive and limiting the creativity and limiting the potential,” says Tyson. Mature lean users, however, recognize that standardization removes constrains and allows them to create and experiment to produce better results. “A decent chunk of [knowledge work] is basically pattern understanding, pattern synthesis, and pattern projection to get work done,” he adds. “And if you can take and offload that or pair with AI, which it's really good at, it unleashes your creativity.” Negative reaction to improvements made possible with AI: Gene tells the story of an individual who would do many hours of Excel work each day on a highly specific “horrendous” task, and then AI applied a macro that could do it for her. “Her reaction was anger. She's like, ‘How dare you? I didn't ask for this.” AI removed something she held “near and dear.” Tyson says a path to overcome this natural human reaction to someone’s work being removed is a better foundation of understanding of value-add vs. non-value add vs. incidental work from the customer’s perspective. The fear of AI taking jobs is real for some individuals and in some companies: Art relates AI improvements back to early lean improvements, when removing non-value-added piece of work from someone’s work was viewed as taking away their job; they did not recognize the lean improvement was freeing them to think of the other ways they could be adding value to the organization. Tyson says it’s critical to help rewrite people's identity as creators and improvers rather than lathe worker or spreadsheet specialist. “It's also kind of a tragedy that so many people and so many organizations aren't afforded the ability to remake their identity as an improver of their own work processes and workflows because of either the leadership structure or the behavior, the cultures of the organization.” Overcoming resistance to AI: Pair coding/programming (when two people code together) and learning by doing together has real value in getting individuals to embrace what’s possible with AI, says Art. “If there's a respected person in the organization, sometimes there's peer learning that occurs. There's different ways people get influenced, different directions. And peer coding seems to me to be a very natural way of transfer of information that's often mutually beneficial, and you get a better result, learn by doing, low risk, high reward.” He adds the interest in AI goes from incremental to exponential. Gene agrees, and points to examples of increased activation among individuals learning it and just doing it with respected members of their technical community. “We're now in a universe where it is easier to just do the experiment than it is to sort of like ...
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    1 hr and 14 mins
  • Better Thinking Faster: A conversation about solving problems just in time

    Better Thinking Faster: A conversation about solving problems just in time
    Jul 13 2026
    Time is relative, especially when it comes to lean problem solving. The LEI trio of Josh Howell, Mark Reich, and Art Smalley explored how the speed of quality problem solving really depends on the level of the organization in which the problem exists and the types of problems and thinking patterns in place at that level. In this first podcast of two, they examine what “better” and “faster” means in the lean world and how that manifests itself. There’s often a debate among management circles calling for fast problem solving and change vs. slow, deliberate decision-making. Art, Toyota veteran and author of Four Types of Problems, says, “We’re all trying to think better and think faster, respective to our level and the speed that governs it. But it’s overly simplistic to just say ‘think slow.’ You want to, all things equal, arrive at a better end result faster. In reality there are different types of problems, different patterns of thinking, and different mental gears that can be used.” Art discussed different types of problems and the different styles of work used in Toyota to address them. As outlined in his book, they are: Type 1 troubleshooting problem, such as responding to the andon signal at a frontline workstation with a 45-second cycle time, needs to be solved safely and quickly, which will often occur countless times each day because these problems involve a known problem and known solution. Type 2 problems are harder to solve and have unknown root causes and solutions, which require a more analytical mode of thinking. Type 3 problems are actually continuous improvement efforts that seek to establish a new, better target condition. Type 4 problems represent truly innovative new solutions (think hybrid powertrain technologies) that often require years of trial and error. The problem-solving work moves from convergent thinking, known standards, and highly skilled execution at the frontline to middle management using the eight steps of Toyota Business Practice that can take days or weeks, to innovation, which is slower, more deliberate, divergent, and exploratory. Josh looks back to his time at Starbucks and the problem-solving spectrum, contrasting the challenge of trying to transform a company of some 350,000 employees (“That’s going to take some time, and certainly the executives don’t want it to take too much time. It can’t take forever.”) compared to experiencing problems in a store during peak service time when there’s a new customer every 30 seconds. “The way that we were taught from our TPS and lean teachers to improve that situation, improve our performance for the customers, was to really dig into the details of what happens inside those 30 seconds.” Speed is only one facet of lean problem solving. Remember, the Toyota slogan is “Better Thinking, Better Products,” and so quality has to be part of problem-solving work. Mark (LEI Chief Engineer Strategy, author of Managing on Purpose, and also a Toyota veteran) says the quality of problem solving requires developing the capabilities of those doing the problem solving as well as the patience to take sufficient time to examine problems and come to better solutions: “We want to build the capability in the organization for leaders, for people, not just leaders, but for people at every level, to be able to produce good quality work. What’s unique about Toyota is that’s true in any function. We want good quality accounting work. We want good quality planning work. We want good quality work, of course, at where the products made and developed. And I think that does take time to build that capability to produce good quality, whatever function you’re talking about.” The trio also discuss the: Cyclical nature of processes in which problems occur, be that a seconds-long cycle on the line, an annual cycle for formulating corporate strategy, or a decades-long span for replenishing capital equipment. At all levels, the process repeats but the problems will vary, such as market changes impacting the strategy development cycle one year to the next. Use of process cycles as learning: From frontline to the executive suite, it’s not just about fixing the current problem and getting back to work, but taking the time and data to come up with better solutions and standards for future work. “There’s so much here to look closely at, to analyze, to scrutinize,” says Josh. “There’s so many details that we can question, and inside all of those details are potential solutions, potential improvements, kaizen points that we can make things better.” Need to involve as many people as possible in addressing problems — the work of problem detection, notification, response, and solving. Considering the number of problems that exist ...
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    40 mins
  • Sebastian Fixson and Jim Morgan on Why Human Judgment will be Essential for Product Development in the Age of AI

    Sebastian Fixson and Jim Morgan on Why Human Judgment will be Essential for Product Development in the Age of AI
    Jul 27 2026

    In this episode of the WLEI Podcast, we speak with Jim Morgan and Sebastian Fixson about organizational implications for product development and what building your team’s product development capabilities looks like in the age of AI. Morgan is the author of Designing the Future and has spent over 30 years in industry as a product development leader including serving as a global engineering director at Ford Motor Company during the product-led revitalization under CEO Alan Mulally. Sebastian Fixson is Founding Faculty Director of the DBA Program and Professor of Innovation & Design at Babson College and author of The Innovation Navigator: Transforming Your Organization in the Era of AI.

    The conversation explores:

    • What people-first leadership means in practice
    • Why particular structures, processes, and practices are needed in product development to help people do their best work
    • The trade-offs inherent in functional and product organizations
    • The organizational and product development implications of new technologies including generative AI
    • How today’s entrepreneurs are thinking about product development and how to invest in developing the next generation of developers
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    27 mins
  • Better Thinking Faster: Toyota Problem-Solving Secrets

    Better Thinking Faster: Toyota Problem-Solving Secrets
    Jul 28 2026
    In the first half of their podcast Better Thinking Faster, Josh Howell, Mark Reich, and Art Smalley discussed solving problems just in time and how the speed of quality problem solving depends on the level of the organization and the types of problems to be found there. In this second half of the podcast, they examine unique traits of problem solving at Toyota that help employees — frontline to senior executives — solve problems better and faster, characteristics that many companies attempting to be lean fail to grasp. Create Experiential Learning Many leaders attempt to apply lean based on reading about it and the management processes and tools involved, says Art, Toyota veteran and author of Four Types of Problems. That’s helpful, but it lacks lean problem-solving experiences. For example, working on a line and solving many small problems daily provides formative learning within Toyota that’s carried forward as a team member advances into management and executive ranks. “Many of us who encounter these ideas later in life, when we’re at higher levels in our career and in our organizations, don’t always get that opportunity,” says Josh, LEI President. He admires Toyota for onboarding individuals, even white-collar executives, by throwing them onto the line “to work at that level of detail and all the opportunity that could be found therein, to just set a mindset that can be very useful to you even as you get into higher level, longer cycle time, more ambitious, more complex work.” So what is an executive, without Toyota-like onboarding and problem-solving experiences, supposed to do? Mark, LEI Chief Engineer Strategy and author of Managing on Purpose, says they can at least go to line, to where the work is done, and experience it by observing. He’s seen executives who, when going to the frontline, are astounded by “the amount of difficult, unnecessary, frustrating work that happens minute to minute, day to day.” That helps them to experience the precise nature of work and problems there, but they also must care “that people shouldn’t have to work that way, and people are working like that in many organizations. I think Toyota leaders cared, and not just about the shopfloor ... but about everybody in the organization and that everybody in the organization had value-creating work.” Art sees it as LEI’s purpose to close the learning gap among leaders not coming out of Toyota and somehow help executives gain the experiences he and Mark encountered when working there: “Mark and I got it through line work, working in Toyota, and in our careers of seeing it at various levels. Other people need to kind of come to that awareness, have the fish scales removed from their eyes in different ways.” Examine the Process behind Outcomes Toyota’s unique approach to problem solving includes an obsession with going well beyond the cause of a problem to determine how a process or processes contributed to the outcome and cause. Art cites the example of a failed launch at one of Toyota’s overseas plants. Equipment vendor problems contributed to poor outcomes. Instead of citing “failed vendor, not our problem” and moving on, every aspect of the business pertaining to precision equipment that went to overseas operations was thoroughly analyzed to ensure the next overseas launch would be better than the last. It turns out a variety of documentation, support materials, and training that accompanied equipment going overseas was poor, and Toyota worked for a year or more to make it right. “Toyota is very good about thinking about the process that led to the end result,” says Art. “Most people want to be critical and criticize the end result. Toyota will go back, back, back, back, back. What were our initial assumptions and thought processes and conditions that led us down this path?” Mark and Art say this approach is not for Toyota to find blame, but to ensure it does not happen again: 5 Whys not the 5 Whos. Solve All Problems, Big and Small The trio discussed how Toyota veterans on the frontline are capable of repeatedly finding and solving hundreds of small problems in the work they have been doing for years. That extent of problem solving on the frontlines is much less common outside of Toyota, where there is likely to be an overemphasis on bigger leadership problems and decisions. “A lot of organizations look at the decisions and the problems that leaders are solving as key,” says Mark. “Toyota sees that the team member finding those 120 issues in their job is as important to the company as the CEO and the decisions they’re making.” Toyota wants to be solving small problems fast before they can become big problems. “A lot of ...
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    28 mins
  • Coaching and Co-Learning — Coach as Mirror

    Coaching and Co-Learning — Coach as Mirror
    Apr 14 2026

    This week The Management Brief presents the second installment in our series on coaching across the lean community and the benefits of mutual learning — senior leaders with external and/or internal lean coaches as well as peer-to-peer relationships. These connections can deliver more value and open avenues of understanding and growth not possible when leaders try to go it alone.

    Mark Reich, LEI Chief Engineer Strategy, is joined by Desh Edirisuriya, General Manager, New Zealand Manufacturing and Business Excellence with Fisher & Paykel Healthcare, and Jim Luckman, LEI Coach and Partner in Lean Transformations Group. Fisher & Paykel is a manufacturer of respiratory care products based in Auckland, and the company is driven by an objective to improve care and outcomes for patients.

    Desh was instrumental in setting up the company’s Business Excellence function. He was first exposed to lean during an extraordinary growth phase at the company, implementing tools and processes to solve the problem of scaling up. Desh has been with Fisher & Paykel for 25 years, along the way learning how to better understand his role as it has changed and where he must focus. Desh says Jim has helped him with that by “being sort of a mirror [to] get good feedback, reflect, and also help me see my role, my gaps, and then help me through developing a way to bridge those gaps.” Desh adds that he often does not know he’s being coached by Jim, but inevitably he ends up changing his behavior as a result of their conversations.

    Jim spent 30 years with General Motors, including time at Delphi as a Chief Engineer, director of a site with 600 R&D people, and learning and practicing how to apply lean in R&D. He got involved in coaching after Delphi, and he sees coaching as a means to help individuals solve fundamental problems inside of their businesses from top to bottom, with “the right people solving the right problem at the right time.” He describes his experience with Desh as a “co-learning experience, it’s not one way. I don’t feel like a coach as much as a co-learner.”

    Topics that Mark addresses with Desh and Jim include:

    • Experiments run by Desh at Fisher & Paykel with leaders, direct reports, and shopfloor teams to build social connections and create respectful dialogue among respective groups, and the challenges Desh has encountered with those experiments.
    • Asking good questions that get people to think about what’s actually going on instead of focusing on their own thinking and not listening to the person you want to do the thinking.
    • Learnings achieved by Desh and Jim in their work together and their future plans.

    Interested in bringing a coach to your organization? Learn more at lean.org/CLP
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    16 mins
  • Coaching and Co-Learning — Understanding that Lean Is a Journey

    Coaching and Co-Learning — Understanding that Lean Is a Journey
    Apr 7 2026

    This week The Management Brief kicks off an extended series on the coaching and co-learning that is occurring throughout the lean community. We’ll be exploring the benefits of mutual learning in all its forms — senior leaders with their lean coaches, be they external or internal to the organization, as well peer-to-peer relationships — that deliver more value and open avenues of understanding and growth not possible when going it alone.

    Most if not all leaders are looking for guidance tailored to their positions, and that’s especially true of lean leaders seeking to transform themselves and their organizations. Effective coaching and co-learning relationships offer a “follow me and we’ll figure this out together” association that enables both partners to navigate a lean journey, establish a path for lean transformation, and achieve sustainable results. We will examine what makes lean coaching and co-learning relationships effective, and, in the process, provide insights into how to establish your own co-learning opportunities.

    Our initial installment in this series brings together Marco Lopez, CEO Dreamplace Hotels, & Resorts in the Canary Islands, which embarked on a lean “never-ending” journey 15 years ago, and Oriol Cuatrecasas, coach with the Instituto Lean Management in Spain and a lean practitioner for decades. Mark Reich, LEI Chief Engineer, Strategy, interviews the duo who discuss co-learning and the Dreamplace journey, including:

    • In 2009, Marco says he and others in the company asked, “What can we do to be more competitive,” and realized they had to do something new and that lean was an option. He is grateful they came to the decision to pursue lean, now seeing it as “the only way,” despite not recognizing early on that the journey would not be easy or fast and takes continuous attention and effort to sustain.

    • Marco recalls directors working on the first A3s with Oriol, with them being instructed to go out to the gemba and solve real problems. He realized this approach was going to take time, and he and directors would need to be patient and support people every step of the way. Marco recognized that lean was not a “plug-in solution.”

    • Oriol recalls what attracted him to working with Dreamplace. Around 2010, he was speaking at a public conference and, at the end of the event, advised attendees to take a problem, take a team, learn, apply lean, and share successes (as Jim Womack often advised). Five years later he received an email from an operations manager at Dreamplace who described doing precisely what Oriol had suggested, wanted to share with him what a team was working on, and asked, “When are you going to come?” Oriol went to Dreamplace and met the manager and Marco. A Dreamplace team had begun breaking down silos (lodging department, kitchen, housekeeping, etc.) that prevented flow in serving hotel guests better, and also was working to have a majority of business decisions made by frontline employees. “Immediately I fell in love with these people, and said ‘When do we start?’”

    • Marco and Oriol discuss how lean was meant for the hospitality industry, an environment that is purely value-added and in which every customer requires a customized experience. This environment requires a reliance on cross-functional teams to seamlessly support the customer’s journey throughout all aspects of their stay.

    • Coaching has helped Marco and managers within Dreamplace learn how to set goals, manage and empower people, and be honest and open with teams. For example, Marco learned to show up at the gemba and support staff without dominating the situation. Dreamplace started its lean journey internally, working on its own for five years. In hindsight, Marco advises others to ask for professional help from the beginning: “You will save at least two or three years.” Oriol says it helps to be coaching “the right executive,” someone who can make real decisions to change things, own the transformation, and accept that there will be moments of frustration that must be worked through to avoid failure.

    Interested in bringing coaching and co-learning to your organization? Schedule a call today.
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    26 mins
  • 20 Years Later: How Toyota's Product Development Principles Are Still Core to a Lean Enterprise

    20 Years Later: How Toyota's Product Development Principles Are Still Core to a Lean Enterprise
    Apr 6 2026

    In this special edition of the WLEI Podcast, hosts Lex Schroeder and LEI President Josh Howell sit down with former product development executive Jim Morgan to explore the lasting impact of The Toyota Product Development System: Integrating People, Process, and Technology, the groundbreaking book he co-authored with Jeff Liker. Two decades after its release, the insights that revealed Toyota’s unique approach to product development remain a cornerstone for any organization striving to become a great product company.

    Together, they examine:

    • The story behind the research that inspired The Toyota Product Development System, what drove Jim to uncover Toyota’s secrets of innovation, and how to apply them today
    • The enduring principles engineering leaders still rely on to build teams that consistently design products customers love (and buy)
    • How Jim translated lean product and process development (LPPD) lessons into practical action across his own career as a product development and operations executive, adapting them to diverse challenges and contexts.
    • Common hurdles companies face when putting core LPPD ideas into practice—and where to begin the transformation journey.
    • Why so many organizations hesitate to take those hard, necessary steps to develop their people and achieve genuine enterprise transformation.

    Whether you’re new to lean thinking or deep into your own transformation, this conversation offers both history and insight into how timeless principles continue to shape the future of product development and provide the key to a lean enterprise.

    Learn more about lean product and process development at lean.org/LPPD

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    29 mins
  • Cutting through the Noise in Tech: Sarah Milstein's Advice for Leaders Who Want to Keep People Focused on Value Creation

    Cutting through the Noise in Tech: Sarah Milstein's Advice for Leaders Who Want to Keep People Focused on Value Creation
    Dec 4 2025

    In this episode of the WLEI Podcast, we speak with executive coach and engineering leader Sarah Milstein about how to keep teams focused on value creation by putting people at the center of work design.

    My conversation with Sarah explores:

    • How to create cultures of respect as a leader
    • How companies can simplify job roles, salaries, and raises to focus employees on high-value work
    • Sarah’s advice for how engineering and product leaders can successfully navigate this moment in tech, including the trends that will pass and the trends that will stick
    • How to work with teams of engineers to create the conditions for continuous learning
    • How to support people well so that teams build strong, sustainable lean product and process development systems

    About Sarah Milstein

    Sarah Milstein coaches executive and emerging leaders in tech. Previously, she held executive roles at a number of tech startups and in the federal government. She was also CEO and co-founder of Lean Startup Productions. Earlier, she was a freelance journalist writing regularly for The New York Times. She holds an MBA from UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. https://sarahmilstein.com

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    25 mins