Year-End Reflections: What Should FPW's New Year's Resolution Be?

"Get more tangible results from our experiments." "Showcase progress from workgroups in monthly meetings." "Get more people involved - bring a friend." "Get a couple of potential groups lined up to do this work."

These weren't predictions for 2026 - they were answers to a single question posed at the December Future of People at Work community meeting: "What should FPW's New Year's resolution be?"

As approximately 20 practitioners gathered for the final monthly meeting of 2025, the variety of responses revealed something important about where this emerging movement stands. Some participants focused on internal improvements - meeting more frequently, making progress more visible. Others pushed for external growth - expanding participation, improving messaging. Together, they sketched a picture of a community recognizing that real transformation requires both depth and breadth.

From Talking About It to Actually Doing It

The Ways of Working group provided perhaps the clearest example of moving from concept to concrete action. Dana Miller, Susanna Watson, and Christopher reported on their partnership with the Michigan Science Center, where continuous improvement has become one of the organization's strategic goals for 2026 under the theme "catalyst."

This isn't your typical lean implementation. The Science Center created a new "UNO" team with two distinct roles - Engagement (handling curriculum development and visitor experiences) and Experience (managing operations and facilities). The Ways of Working team is pursuing parallel tracks: working with staff to shift thinking patterns while simultaneously developing a physical exhibit using simple games to teach concepts like batch versus one-piece flow.

"We need organizations that need strategy alignment and process improvement to build an experiment base," Dana explained during the report-out. The team has moved beyond defining what Ways of Working means to actually testing it in an environment where people "don't think lean or talk lean."

What emerged from their breakout discussion was particularly telling. The group acknowledged they needed better self-organization (proposing a Kanban board for volunteer task management) and wrestled with the emotional complexity of change work. One anecdote captured this beautifully: a 5S experiment at the Science Center revealed items staff had hoarded that carried emotional baggage from when the organization was the Detroit Science Center and had gone bankrupt. Staff feared discarding these items would confirm "the previous organization never mattered."

This is the messy reality of organizational transformation that conference presentations often sanitize away. The Ways of Working team isn't avoiding it - they're designing experiments specifically to understand and work with these human factors.

The Credentialing Conversation Gets Real

Meanwhile, the LEAN (Lean Education Academic Network) steering committee has waded into equally complex territory: exploring potential standards for lean certification at universities. Ken Snyder reported they're developing "measurable characteristics for an amazing student learning experience" while wrestling with whether to create new standards or partner with existing credentialing organizations.

The conversation got particularly interesting when participants noted the recent news of Agile Alliance joining the Project Management Institute. "Maybe that's better," one participant suggested - partnering rather than proliferating new certification schemes.

Dave Ostreicher emphasized the group's focus on improving student problem-solving and teamwork capabilities, moving beyond tool mastery to develop thinking skills. The challenge: how do you credential something as fundamentally human as "learning how to think about problems"?

Harmonization Over Universal Theory

Bruce Hamilton's update on the Adjacent Communities initiative captured the fundamental challenge facing the continuous improvement field: when expertise and authority are widely dispersed, how do you help organizations navigate complexity?

After scheduling difficulties around Thanksgiving prevented the group from achieving quorum, Bruce announced plans to "just start over sometime next week." But the breakout session revealed this wasn't a group lacking direction - it was a group wrestling with one of the field's most difficult questions.

"For many different methodologies, it's hard to say 'well who's the authority' because the relevant knowledge is very dispersed," Bruce explained. This dispersed authority creates confusion for organizations trying to determine what tools and methods work for their specific situation.

The group welcomed Brion, a new participant who owns a Lean Six Sigma consulting firm focused on helping nonprofit organizations and government agencies. His arrival underscored a key tension: while the improvement field has developed sophisticated methodologies, organizations working on "real important problems" often struggle to access and apply them effectively.

The conversation got interesting when discussing AI. Bruce expressed strong views about what he called the "obsession" with AI, comparing it to the scene in Jaws where "everyone chases the shark without knowing what they are pursuing." For Adjacent Communities' work on harmonizing improvement concepts, AI is "relatively irrelevant," he argued - though Rachel countered with data showing employment and productivity are already decoupling due to automation.

This wasn't dismissing technology - it was recognizing that the Adjacent Communities' core work addresses something more fundamental: helping organizations understand when to use which approach.

"We're trying to create a bigger toolbox," the group agreed, explicitly rejecting the search for a "universal field theory" of improvement. When companies get caught up arguing whether bottleneck focus represents Theory of Constraints or Toyota Production System thinking, they miss the point. If the current "mishmash of terminology" is working and "not destructive," the approach should be amplified rather than changed.

But this doesn't mean anything goes. Bruce emphasized that while basic problem-solving skills are necessary, specialized methodologies like SMED (Single Minute Exchange of Dies) are "not something which is intuitive" and are "critical to improvement." Joe added his perspective about training people to observe problems through a safety lens, providing a strong "foothold" for developing problem-solving capabilities.

The group also touched on the long-standing "Book of Knowledge" concept that multiple FPW groups have discussed. Rachel confirmed Ken Snyder had indicated Dave was leading that project, though different groups view it from different angles - Lean Education sees it as a standard syllabus, NextGen as simplification, the CEO group from yet another perspective.

"Nobody's really doing it," Joe observed about the consolidation everyone discusses. He suggested that defining a clear problem for FPW to solve might provide the focused direction needed for 2026.

Janice Hodge continues building out the Adjacent Communities spreadsheet with drop-down menus and categorization by methodological strengths. Dana plans to add the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) framework. As Jeanne Carey had noted earlier, EOS is based on lean principles but uses completely different language - and small business owners will pay $20,000 to $50,000 for implementation support.

This matters because it demonstrates what Adjacent Communities is really about: not comparing methodologies but helping practitioners understand contextual application. Different problems require different solutions. Different organizational cultures respond to different languages. The goal isn't to pick winners - it's to make the full toolbox accessible and understandable.

Making Space for Next Generations

The Next Generation Lean Leadership group spent their breakout time exploring how two companies have implemented lean concepts accessibly. Jeanne Carey emphasized they're looking for examples where organizations used the approach for learning "how they did it, what was the approach they used" without heavy terminology.

"What is the model for how this works for the next generation?" someone captured on a sticky note. The question cuts to something essential: if the average age of CI professionals is over 50 with no succession plan (as symposium participants noted in Salt Lake City), accessibility isn't just nice to have - it's existential.

The group continues seeking companies interested in everyday language implementations, making connections to what's important to leaders rather than prescribing specific approaches. "Easier, better, faster, cheaper blog post (Eric). How does it connect to this work?" another note read, capturing the ongoing challenge of translation.

The AI Integration Challenge Continues

Peter Barnett from Shingo shared an update on the Lean Into AI webinar series, noting they've completed two sessions with a clear principle: "Lead with lean thinking not tools." The next meeting needs scheduling to continue the planned six-event series.

When someone suggested getting a panel together for future webinars, it highlighted an ongoing challenge: the initiative needs more speakers willing to bridge these domains. The integration of lean thinking and AI capabilities remains one of FPW's most pressing and least resolved challenges.

What Gets Measured (and Shared) Gets Done

Tania Lyon's comment in the chat captured something important about the blog documentation work: "Those blogposts have been great. Well done!" Both Dave Ostreicher and Dana Miller reacted positively.

This seemingly small moment reflects a larger pattern. FPW has committed to documenting its work transparently - not just the successes but the messy middle of experimentation. Eric Olsen's request for help editing Blog 8 represents this collaborative approach: drafts go into Google Docs where the community can comment, suggest, and improve before publication.

Brion Hurley proposed another documentation-adjacent idea: creating a system to match students and professionals with nonprofit organizations seeking help. This would serve multiple purposes - providing real-world learning opportunities, supporting under-resourced nonprofits, and creating a pipeline of next-generation practitioners with diverse experience.

Looking Ahead: Houston, Pittsburgh, and Beyond

The meeting concluded with announcements about 2026 events: the Lean Summit in Houston (March 12-13) and a gathering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh (May 7-8). Participants were invited to either attend the Pittsburgh event or "get more intimately involved" in organizing it.

These geographic touchpoints - Houston, Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City from June's symposium - suggest FPW is becoming less California-centric and more genuinely national. The Carnegie Mellon partnership particularly signals growing academic engagement.

As participants wished each other happy holidays and signed off, the Miro board remained populated with sticky notes capturing both aspirations and action items. The notes revealed a community that's moved beyond the "what" and "why" questions into "how" and "when."

"Meet with Christian to help operationalize his strategy and identify areas where improvement tools can be applied," read one Ways of Working action item. "Keep trying to find other experiment areas, preferably working with leadership," read another.

These aren't the grandiose declarations of transformation typical in improvement communities. They're the specific, humble commitments of people actually trying to do the work.

What Should FPW's New Year's Resolution Be?

The question posed at December's meeting didn't get a single answer - it got a chorus of complementary responses. Get more tangible. Show progress. Bring more people. Line up willing organizations. Improve our messaging.

Perhaps that's exactly right. This isn't a movement that needs to pick one direction. It needs to work simultaneously on multiple fronts: delivering practical value while expanding reach, maintaining rigor while improving accessibility, documenting honestly while communicating effectively.

The New Year's resolution for FPW might simply be: Keep doing what we're doing, just more intentionally and more visibly. Let the experiments at the Michigan Science Center teach us about working without lean jargon. Let the university credentialing conversations force clarity about what we're actually trying to develop in people. Let the adjacent communities work push us to understand when different approaches serve best - and perhaps, as Joe suggested, help define the clear problem FPW exists to solve.

And keep asking questions like "What should our resolution be?" - because the diversity of thoughtful responses suggests a community that's thinking deeply about how to make continuous improvement more relevant, more accessible, and more effective for the next generation.

Knowledge Map: Connecting to Your Context

Process Keywords: collaborative experimentation, organizational strategy alignment, emotional dimensions of change, credentialing frameworks, methodology translation, volunteer team self-organization, measurable learning outcomes, contextual methodology selection, tangible results visibility, cross-community bridge building, plain language implementation, succession planning, harmonization over universal theory, dispersed knowledge authority, specialized tool application, amplification over standardization, safety-based problem solving

Context Keywords: museum/nonprofit/government CI implementation, university certification standards, aging practitioner demographics, small business accessibility, multi-methodology confusion, frontline worker engagement, volunteer coordination challenges, cultural trauma and resistance, educational pipeline development, next-generation recruitment, community documentation practices, methodology authority ambiguity, AI integration concerns, Book of Knowledge coordination, dispersed expertise navigation, terminology mishmash management

Application Triggers:

• Working with organizations unfamiliar with CI language → Ways of Working MSC experiment approach

• Developing educational standards or credentials → LEAN university certification exploration

• Navigating multiple improvement methodologies with dispersed authority → Adjacent Communities harmonization approach

• Organizations using "mishmash of terminology" that's working → Amplification over standardization strategy

• Need for specialized non-intuitive tools (like SMED) → Adjacent Communities contextual selection framework

• Addressing succession and accessibility challenges → Next Generation Lean Leadership examples

• Building volunteer-based improvement initiatives → Ways of Working self-organization solutions

• Creating learning opportunities for students → Student-nonprofit matching concept

• Nonprofit or government agency adoption → Brion's sector-specific approach and resources

• Balancing AI integration with core improvement work → Strategic focus on harmonization fundamentals

Related Continual Improvement Themes: This work connects to organizational learning systems, change management approaches, knowledge translation across disciplines, community of practice development, and the evolution of continuous improvement from manufacturing origins to broader application. See also FPW's symposium work on cross-sector learning patterns and the "Better Together" framework for methodology integration.

Continue the conversation:

Follow FPW on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/future-people-work/ 

Join monthly FPW discussions: https://forms.gle/yXPbCXURdfvYtjmn9 

View initiative progress: https://www.fpwork.org/initiatives 

Read previous blog posts: https://www.fpwork.org/blog

People to Connect With: @Eric O. Olsen @Rachel Reuter @Dana Miller @Susanna Watson @Ken Snyder @Bruce Hamilton @Jeanne Carey @Peter Barnett @Dave Ostreicher @Brion Hurley

Hashtags: #FutureOfPeopleAtWork #ContinuousImprovement #WaysOfWorking #LeanEducation #NextGenLeadership #AdjacentCommunities #LeanIntoAI #OrganizationalLearning #CommunityOfPractice

Editorial Contributions: This blog post benefited from editorial review and corrections by Susanna Watson, Vickie Pisowicz, Brion Hurley, and Eric Olsen.

Attribution: This post was developed through synthesis of the December 12, 2025 FPW monthly community meeting, including transcripts, breakout session documentation, and collaborative Miro board work. It was synthesized with Claude.AI assistance. 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).