I tried to achieve some balance in my life by taking a few days off to go fishing on Lake Erie with my son. We chartered a boat for three days—just the two of us. If you’ve never been walleye fishing on a trolling boat (we hadn’t), it’s a bit different from what you would expect, and it was a lot more work than we bargained for.

The crew consisted of the captain (Nate), the…

In my last post, I reflected on a couple of different whys to interrogate a process—either to solve a problem or to create a process improvement. Here are a few more contextual uses of the question “Why?” that I’ve found very helpful as a manager and improvement leader.

When asking why five times to solve a specific problem, we’re intentionally drilling down…

A sound that’s slightly off before a bearing fails. A smell that shows up before a chemical reaction runs hot. A texture that feels wrong before any instrument confirms it. Frontline workers pick up on signals like these constantly and, most of the time, nothing in the plant is built to capture what they notice.

Take a line worker at a food manufacturing plant who notices…