Same Challenges, New Room: What the COE Summit Told Us About Our Four Themes

Eric Olsen
Apr 27
5 min read

This post follows the four-part series from the Future of People at Work Lean Coffee session at the LEI Lean Summit in Houston (March 13, 2026). A month later, FPW ran the same four themes with a new group of practitioners at the Ohio State University Center for Operational Excellence Summit. Here is what we heard.

A month after Houston, we were in Columbus, Ohio, in a breakout room at the OSU-COE Summit. Different city, different crowd, same four questions on the flip charts.

The Future of People at Work hosted a one-hour session on April 8 as part of the COE Summit. Rachel Reuter led the group through an impromptu networking exercise, a brief FPW overview, and four small-group discussions organized around the themes we have been tracking: succession planning, time poverty, organizational silos, and AI integration. Attendees came from IT project management, knowledge management in the utility sector, process improvement, and operational excellence roles. The mix was different from Houston. The themes held.

On Succession: The Pipeline Problem Has a Training Problem Inside It

The succession planning group moved quickly from pipeline questions to a more specific diagnosis: the training itself is the weak link. Participants named three gaps — training that has not been updated, training that is not adapted to the audience it is supposed to reach, and tribal knowledge that lives in people's heads rather than in documented standards. One participant noted the familiar gap between what the process manual says and what actually happens on the floor.

New ideas surfaced that the Houston group had not centered as directly: bringing former practitioners back as consultants or fractional employees to bridge the knowledge transfer period, and starting engagement much earlier — high school and early college — so young people can see what CI roles actually look like before choosing a path. The principle from Houston echoed here: people need to see themselves in something before they will pursue it.

On Time Poverty: Personal and Organizational Are Different Problems

The Columbus group split itself into two sub-groups. One focused on personal time poverty — overloaded calendars, the inability to focus on any single initiative, the question of whether a given meeting is actually worth attending. The other focused on organizational time poverty — the structural challenge of getting stakeholder time for improvement work when daily operations never pause.

This distinction matters. In Houston, the group asked who decides there is no time — reframing scarcity as a decision. In Columbus, the groups got more granular. Individual-level time poverty calls for personal agency and boundary-setting; organizational-level time poverty requires systemic design — clearer prioritization, protected time blocks, and leadership commitment. One participant described communicating upfront to stakeholders exactly how much time a project would require, and designating blackout periods when project meetings would not be scheduled. Both groups arrived at a familiar observation: the teams most in need of improvement often have the least time to engage in it.

On Organizational Silos: The Group Named the Root Word

When the silos group reported back, their spokesperson made a deliberate choice. After mapping communication barriers, duplicate CI teams operating under different names, knowledge hoarding tied to job security fears, and resistance to outside improvement specialists — they summed it up in one word: resistance.

Houston practitioners had described similar dynamics: the not-invented-here problem, competition between departments, lack of visibility into what other teams are working on. The Columbus group went one level deeper. Psychological safety kept appearing in their conversation. People are reluctant to share what they are working on because they fear negative consequences. Silos, in this framing, are not just structural — they are a rational response to organizational conditions that make sharing feel risky. One knowledge management specialist in the room described navigating the same problem internally that she manages externally: connecting departments that do not know what the others are doing, let alone learning from them.

On AI Integration: Where Are You on the Spectrum?

The AI integration group surfaced something that FPW's Lean Into AI webinar series has been circling for months: organizations are not all starting from the same place, and treating them as if they are creates its own problems. The group described a spectrum. Some organizations have no AI background at all — no clear guidance on what tools employees are even permitted to use. Others have an AI vision but no structured learning path, and poor communication about whether AI threatens jobs. More advanced organizations are now trying to assess which business problems are actually suited to AI solutions and which are not.

The group also named a gap the Houston AI conversation had not centered: peer learning. There is no structured way, in most organizations, for practitioners to share what is working with AI — not vendor presentations, but practitioner-to-practitioner exchange. One participant noted that hands-on, life-safety work still requires the human element regardless of how capable AI-based training tools become. Another suggested that documented standards and historical work data could serve as seed content for AI-assisted learning systems.

What Two Sessions Suggest

We are careful about drawing large conclusions from two sessions. But some things are worth noting. The four themes held across very different rooms. Practitioners from IT, utilities, and operational excellence in Columbus landed in essentially the same conversations that healthcare providers, manufacturers, and higher education practitioners had in Houston. The problems are shared.

One piece of post-session feedback from the COE stood out: a participant noted the session would have benefited from a brief discussion of lean principles and their application. That is a useful signal for FPW's session design going forward. The hands-on, participatory format worked well — attendees appreciated the informality and the peer conversation. The invitation to add brief lean context for practitioners newer to CI thinking is one we are holding onto as we head into the FPW Symposium at Carnegie Mellon University in May.

If any of this sounds familiar — knowledge transfer gaps, calendar overload, silos that resist opening, or AI adoption without a learning structure — we would be glad to hear from you.

Knowledge Map: Connecting to Your Context

Process Keywords: Cross-venue theme replication, liberating structures networking, small-group facilitation, AI readiness spectrum, fractional knowledge transfer, protected improvement time, resistance as root cause, tribal knowledge documentation

Context Keywords: COE Summit 2026, personal vs. organizational time poverty, psychological safety, AI peer learning gap, succession planning training gaps, silo resistance

Application Triggers:

Succession pipeline feels thin -- Ask whether training is updated, audience-appropriate, and grounded in documented tribal knowledge
Hearing 'no time for improvement' -- Distinguish personal time poverty (agency, boundaries) from organizational time poverty (design, leadership)
CI team meets resistance from other departments -- Investigate psychological safety as the upstream condition, not just the silo structure
AI adoption stalling -- Map where your organization sits on the readiness spectrum before designing interventions

Related Continual Improvement Themes: Respect for people, organizational learning, knowledge transfer, systems thinking, leadership commitment, psychological safety, change management

This post was developed from practitioner conversations at the FPW Breakout Session at the OSU-COE Summit 2026 (April 8, 2026), synthesized with Claude AI assistance from the Zoom transcript and flip chart documentation. It is the fifth in an ongoing series following the four-part LEI Lean Summit Lean Coffee series (March 13, 2026). 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.

Continue the conversation: