One Month Post-CMU: What the FPW Community Carried Forward

Eric Olsen
Jul 9
3 min read

One month after the FPW Symposium at Carnegie Mellon University: four blogs published, an event planning SOP underway, and a confirmed session at the Northeast Lean Conference. What has your team carried forward?

The answer, across breakout rooms and report-outs, was: quite a bit. The gathering marked the community's return to monthly rhythm after a three-month stretch of back-to-back events—the LEI Summit, OSU-COE Summit, and the CMU Symposium. Rachel Reuter framed the session around that continuity question, and the community delivered.

Content Momentum from CMU

Four blogs from the CMU Symposium are already published. The AI/CI Intersections Discussion blog is in editorial review, and two more—AI Ethics and Leadership Implications, and Initiative Work Groups & Reportouts—are seeking editorial teams. Peg Pennington is compiling the first draft of the AI Hackathon blog. Janice has stepped up to help process remaining content, including material from the Duke Health tour. If you were part of those discussions, your editorial eyes matter—each blog is a shared artifact of what the community experienced together. Want to join the editorial board? Contact eric.o@fpwork.org.

A Systemic Look at Healthcare

Ken Snyder provided an overview of the Better Care Plan—a systemic effort to improve U.S. healthcare through roughly a dozen coordinated initiatives spanning care delivery, workforce, and quality outcomes, not insurance and financial reform alone. The Shingo Institute has publicly endorsed it. Behind the plan is John Toussaint, a long-time FPW community member who, as Ken put it, is spending his retirement trying to fix healthcare in the U.S.—"nothing small." Whether and how FPW engages collectively is still being worked out. Interested? Reach out to Carlos or Eric O.

Relational Pattern Recognition

In the Ways of Working breakout, Colleen Soppelsa shared what the Ways of Working team calls "tossing it into the furnace"—using ChatGPT to analyze meeting transcripts, LinkedIn posts, and presentation materials for relational behavioral patterns. Janice offered a useful frame: People → AI → People—a reminder that the human bookends matter most.

The RPR work has a real-world test coming: Colleen, Susanna Watson, Angela Wolfrum, and Dana Miller are preparing a confirmed 90-minute session at the Northeast Lean Conference. Their goal: show Relational Pattern Recognition in practice, collect feedback from real workplaces, and run PDSA cycles from there.

Continue the Conversation

What's your organization experimenting with at the intersection of AI, lean, and people? The community is actively curious—and collecting what seems to be working. Join the conversation on LinkedIn or at the next Monthly Community Zoom (2nd Friday, 8–9am Pacific).

#LeanThinking #FutureOfWork #ContinualImprovement #Neurodiversity #AIandLean #FPW #FutureOfPeopleAtWork

Knowledge Map

Process Keywords:
- Relational Pattern Recognition (RPR), event planning SOP, opt-in community systems, editorial review workflow, PDSA
Context Keywords:
- post-event content momentum, AI ethics in the workplace, neurodiverse employment, systemic healthcare improvement, community reengagement Application Triggers: If you're managing content capture after a major event → editorial pipeline with named owners and deadlines. If you're exploring AI for team analysis → People → AI → People framework. If your working group has stalled → sponsor conversation before pausing.
Related Continual Improvement Themes:
- Respect for people, psychological safety, standard work, leadership development, adjacent communities

This post was developed from the June 12, 2026 FPW Monthly Community Zoom transcript and synthesized with Claude.AI assistance. Editorial contributions by Susanna Watson and Rachel Reuter. It represents ongoing work by the Future of People at Work initiative, a collaboration of Catalysis, Central Coast Lean, GBMP Consulting Group, Imagining Excellence, Lean Enterprise Institute, Shingo Institute, The Ohio State University Center for Operational Excellence, Toyota Production System Support Center (TSSC), and University of Kentucky Pigman College of Engineering.