I like the plan-do-check-act (PDCA) cycle for three reasons: It’s simple, it provides a pathway for teaching, and it works.

I love teaching. For me, seeing the light bulb over a lean student’s head illuminate for the first time is highly rewarding. During the early years of my lean journey, management entrusted co-workers to me for training. Oftentimes I couldn’t engage my associates in the topics. It seemed my training sessions lacked the enthusiasm to be successful. Without proper training and understanding of key concepts, lean initiatives could easily stagnate. As a lean leader, this trend became personal… a little learning only gives a little reward.

Throughout the years of learning, sharing, and teaching lean concepts, these situations led me to an important discovery. Not everyone who is asked to become part of a lean transformation is personally on board, especially at the beginning.

I’ve found that my teaching and coaching success could be greatly increased by purposefully tweaking what I was teaching so it could be absorbed by those involved personally. To help illustrate the idea, here’s how I best relate to the PDCA cycle.

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