Opening the Door: Making Improvement Accessible to Everyone

FPW Symposium 2025 Blog Series, Part 7

"I almost didn't enter this field. Every conference felt like a foreign language class with no one who looked like me."

This young practitioner's confession at the FPW Symposium struck a nerve. As symposium participants shared observations about workforce demographics—noting that the majority of continuous improvement professionals are nearing retirement age while recruitment of younger practitioners lags—the room confronted an uncomfortable truth: we've built walls around the very knowledge meant to empower everyone.

Josh Howell observed that the improvement community has become an exclusive club when it needs to be an inclusive movement.

The Barriers We Never Meant to Build

The challenge facing the improvement community isn't just about workforce demographics. It's about accessibility. Between Japanese terminology, expensive certifications, and corporate-focused examples, improvement methodology has become the province of large organizations with dedicated resources. Meanwhile, the vast majority of U.S. businesses—those with fewer than 10 employees—are effectively excluded from these conversations.

Symposium participants identified barriers that cut deep across two distinct but related challenges: reaching younger practitioners AND reaching smaller organizations.

Language Barriers: "When I say 'gemba,' the coffee shop owner I'm trying to help thinks I'm speaking gibberish," shared one consultant. Japanese terms (kaizen, muda, muri), technical acronyms (DMAIC, PDCA, VSM), and methodology-specific vocabulary create an insider culture that intimidates newcomers regardless of age or organization size.

Economic Barriers: The standard model of "one lean practitioner per 100 employees" automatically excludes small businesses. The coffee shop manager who could benefit most from improvement thinking can't afford a consultant or dedicated improvement resource.

Cultural Barriers: "Every example is from a factory floor. Every case study from a Fortune 500 company," noted an educator. "My students work in restaurants, retail, startups. They can't see themselves in our stories."

Generational Barriers: Digital natives consume information through TikTok, YouTube, and interactive platforms. Traditional delivery methods—three-day seminars, lengthy textbooks, and slide presentations—don't align with how younger professionals prefer to learn.

Two Challenges, One Underlying Problem

While the symposium discussions sometimes blurred the lines between "reaching younger practitioners" and "reaching smaller organizations," participants recognized these share a common root cause: improvement knowledge has become unnecessarily exclusive.

A young professional at a Fortune 500 company faces different barriers than a 50-year-old coffee shop owner—but both are excluded when we:

• Use terminology that requires insider knowledge to understand

• Design training that assumes dedicated time and resources

• Share examples that don't reflect their work context

• Require expensive certifications as entry points

The countermeasures that emerged address both challenges simultaneously.

The Plain Language Revolution

The Adjacent Communities initiative, led by Bruce Hamilton (GBMP), sparked something deceptively simple yet revolutionary: translate everything into plain language.

"If we can't explain it simply, we don't understand it well enough ourselves," Bruce Hamilton observed.

Examples that emerged:

• "Gemba" becomes "where work happens"

• "Sensei" becomes "experienced guide"

• "Kaizen" becomes "small improvements that add up"

• "Value stream" becomes "steps to deliver what customers want"

• "Takt time" becomes "pace to meet customer demand"

• "5S" becomes "organizing for efficiency and safety"

This isn't dumbing down—it's opening up. As Rachel Reuter emphasized, even "solutions" becomes "countermeasures" in lean thinking, acknowledging continuous improvement never reaches final answers. But then "countermeasures" itself needs translation: "things we're trying to make it better."

(If you were shaking your head at how these words were "made plain"—ask yourself why. Does it really make a difference what language we use, or does it make a difference how we communicate our intent, fully and deeply, to whomever we're speaking?)

Creative Engagement That Actually Works

Education professionals presented compelling observations about learning modalities. One educator shared their experience: "Same content delivered via short-form videos versus traditional lectures showed dramatically higher engagement."

This wasn't pandering to short attention spans. It was recognizing that learning modalities have evolved. The University Student Experience initiative proposed revolutionary approaches:

60-Second Micro-Learning: Bite-sized improvement concepts consumable during breaks. Ken Snyder demonstrated how complex statistical process control could be explained through coffee shop examples in under a minute.

Graphic Novel Textbooks: Visual storytelling making concepts stick. "My students remember stories, not definitions," one educator noted. "Why fight that when we can use it?"

Reality TV Format: Following actual transformations in real-time. "Students binge-watch home renovation shows. Why not workplace renovation shows?"

Gaming and Simulation: "Learn by PLAYING" recognized that interactive learning beats passive consumption. Action-based learning programs at institutions like University of Michigan's Tauber Institute for Global Operations demonstrate this approach in practice.

(See also Paul Akers' 2-Second Lean approach, which has proven effective in smaller business contexts.)

The Coffee Shop Test

A breakthrough moment came when someone asked: "Could a coffee shop owner understand and use what we're teaching?"

The room went quiet. Coffee shops represent everything excluded from traditional improvement: small scale, service-based, resource-constrained, young workforce. If improvement principles are truly universal, they should work for a barista as well as an assembly line worker.

Next Generation Leadership Steps Forward

Jeanne Carey and Vickie Pisowicz stepped forward to lead the Next Generation Lean Leadership effort. Supported by 25 volunteer mentors, they are now collaborating to define and advance the working group's next steps.

The NextGen team is focused on engaging and empowering the next generation to carry continuous improvement forward by making it more simply understood and communicated, accessible, modern, inclusive, and aligned with how younger generations learn and work. Their aim is to sustain improvement's cultural foundations while evolving its communication, learning pathways, and community-building for future leaders.

What they intend to do:

• Modernize communication by shifting away from jargon and tool-centric messaging toward inclusive, relatable principles

• Reach and engage younger audiences using modern platforms, relevant language, and resonant experiences

• Simplify and unify principles around a common framework rooted in the scientific method

• Expand learning pathways through mentoring, collaboration, experimentation, and early-career/education-based exposure

Note: The team is actively seeking individuals and organizations interested in exploring, experimenting, and co-creating countermeasures to these challenges—and in deepening collective understanding of the needs, obstacles, and opportunities.

Small Business, Big Impact

The discussions revealed untapped potential in small businesses. One participant shared: "A food truck owner implemented flow principles without knowing the word 'lean.' She just wanted faster service."

Examples multiplied:

• Hair salon reducing customer wait through visual scheduling

• Bakery eliminating waste through simple batching changes

• Auto repair shop improving quality through basic mistake-proofing

• Dental office enhancing patient experience through standard work

These businesses couldn't afford consultants. They didn't need them. They needed accessible principles explained in their language, solving their problems.

The Multi-Generational Bridge

The Team Leaders affinity group discovered emotional intelligence as the unexpected generational bridge. It wasn't about teaching younger workers old methods or older workers new technology. It was about creating conditions for mutual understanding.

"My 20-year-old employee described her generation as 'like a different world,'" one leader shared. "But when we focused on shared frustrations about waste, common desires for meaningful work—the age gap disappeared."

The Next Generation initiative embedded this insight, creating paired learning where young professionals teach digital communication, experienced practitioners share timeless principles, both learn from each other, and neither dominates the conversation.

Education's Creative Rebellion

Academic institutions showed remarkable willingness to abandon traditional approaches. The push for "next-gen friendly channels" wasn't capitulation—it was evolution.

Community College Innovation: Certificates, competitions, and clubs are replacing traditional coursework. Students learn through doing, not just listening.

University Partnerships: University faculty are committing to the LEAN (Lean Education Academic Network) initiative, redesigning lean curricula for accuracy and accessibility. (Learn more at fpwork.org/initiatives)

(Honorable mention to Shrinivas Gondhalekar who taught Lean concepts by making YouTube videos with students as actors.)

The Irony of Accessibility

Making improvement accessible strengthens improvement practice itself:

• Forced to explain concepts simply, we understand them better

• Required to demonstrate value quickly, we focus on what matters

• Challenged to engage differently, we innovate our practices

• Needing to attract diverse voices, we enrich our perspectives

As John Shook reflected during the symposium: "The principles remain constant—respect for people, continuous improvement. But if our language excludes people, we're violating the first principle."

Your Role in Opening the Door

This isn't about waiting for institutional change. Every practitioner can start immediately:

1. Translate your expertise: Take your favorite improvement tool. Explain it without jargon.

2. Test accessibility: Share concepts with someone outside the field. Can they use it?

3. Create micro-content: Make 60-second videos. Write one-page guides. Draw simple diagrams.

4. Bridge generations: Pair with someone 20 years older or younger. Learn from each other.

5. Embrace small scale: Help one small business. Document the impact.

The Movement Emerges

The challenge revealed a deeper truth: making continuous improvement accessible to both emerging practitioners and small organizations strengthens improvement practice itself. This isn't primarily about a succession crisis or replacing retiring practitioners—it's about reimagining how improvement knowledge can empower everyone, everywhere.

The initiatives emerging from the symposium—Adjacent Communities (led by Bruce Hamilton), Next Generation Lean Leadership (led by Jeanne Carey and Vickie Pisowicz, sponsored by Catalysis with LEI and Imagining Excellence), and University Student Experience (coordinating through the LEAN network)—are actively experimenting with these accessibility approaches. They're documenting what works, adjusting what doesn't, and sharing learning across the community.

Because "Better Together" means creating space for every voice, in whatever language they bring.

Next: How 11 initiatives emerged from Open Space Technology and continue evolving through monthly community action.

Knowledge Map: Connecting to Your Context

This section helps you identify how these insights relate to your specific situation, bridging the gap between general concepts and personal application.

Process Keywords: Plain language translation, micro-learning content, visual storytelling, paired mentoring, accessibility design, jargon elimination, cross-generational collaboration, small-scale experimentation, digital engagement, practical demonstration, concept simplification, sector-specific examples

Context Keywords: Workforce accessibility, small business exclusion, generation gap, certification barriers, resource constraints, terminology intimidation, sector misalignment, practitioner recruitment, entry barriers, cultural disconnect, learning preferences, organizational size

Application Triggers:

• Seeing declining engagement from younger practitioners → Plain language translation and micro-learning approaches

• Working with small businesses lacking CI resources → Coffee shop test and simplified materials

• Facing generational divides in improvement teams → Emotional intelligence bridge and paired learning

• Struggling with practitioner recruitment → Accessibility audit and creative engagement methods

• Teaching improvement but losing student interest → Digital-native delivery and visual storytelling

Related Continual Improvement Themes: Knowledge transfer, organizational learning, leadership development, change management, community building, practitioner development

Continue the conversation:

• Follow FPW on LinkedIn: Future of People at Work

• Join monthly FPW discussions: Sign up here

• Explore initiatives and resources: www.fpwork.org/initiatives

People to Connect With: @Bruce Hamilton @Vickie Pisowicz @Jeanne Carey @Ken Snyder @Rachel Reuter @Eric O. Olsen @John Shook @Josh Howell

Hashtags: #FutureOfPeopleAtWork #PlainLanguageLean #NextGeneration #SmallBusinessImprovement #AccessibleExcellence #DemocratizingImprovement

Attribution: This post was co-created by the 110 participants of the FPW Symposium 2025 and synthesized with Claude AI assistance. Part seven of nine documenting our journey toward workplace transformation. 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, and Toyota Production System Support Center (TSSC).

Editorial Contributors: Special thanks to Christopher Ferrier, Dave Ostreicher, Eric O. Olsen, Jeanne Carey, Joseph Pesz, Rachel Reuter, and Vickie Pisowicz for their review and contributions to this post.

Note on data sources: Statistics and insights referenced in this post emerged from symposium participant discussions and represent collective observations rather than formal research studies. For rigorous citation standards, readers are encouraged to consult academic literature on continuous improvement workforce demographics.