Notes on operational excellence.

Why Some Gemba Walks Don't Change Anything: What the Data Says About the Ones That Do

Published 15 September 2026

Last week I wrote that leadership (and management) who live a change, rather than just sponsor it, have a five point list of surprising habits. The first habit was showing up at workstations regularly enough that a visit isn't an event, and asking probing questions rather than only inspecting. This habit has a name in operational excellence: the "Gemba walk". It's worth a closer look, as the evidence on it's impact, is interesting, and more useful, than the age old advice to "get out of your chair/meeting room and walk the floor."

What a Gemba walk actually is

Gemba is Japanese for "the real place." In a manufacturing environment, that's the shop floor: the actual workstation, the actual machine, the actual point where a problem is happening, not the meeting room where it's being discussed. A Gemba walk, a routine that grew out of the Toyota Production System, is a structured visit to that "real place" so leadership and management can observe the work being done, first hand. They can (and should) ask the people doing it what's actually making their work difficult, instead of relying on a second or third hand status report or a dashboard that's already had the inconvenient detail smoothed out of it.

This sounds almost too straightforward to be a leadership and management discipline. That's exactly why it's not always executed successfully.

The uncomfortable finding: presence alone doesn't help

The most rigorous study on Gemba walks I've seen isn't a Lean case study at all. It's a randomised field study of Management By Walking Around, a productivity tool which is very similar to the Gemba walk. The study was run across U.S. hospitals by researchers from Harvard Business School and the Harvard School of Public Health. Twenty hospitals were randomly assigned to run an 18 month programme in which senior managers walked the frontline, asked staff to identify problems, and worked with them to resolve issues.

That finding surprised the researchers as much as it probably surprises you (and me, at first!!). It would have been easy to move past it and only quote the studies that make Gemba walks look good. But the more useful finding is buried in the detail of why it failed on average, because it identifies what separates a walk that works from one that doesn't.

What actually made the difference

The treatment hospitals identified an average of 17.3 problems per work area and resolved 9.1 of them, just over 50%. When the researchers investigated which work areas improved and which didn't, two things came to light:

• Work areas that solved a higher proportion of easy, quick to fix problems experienced better results. In the study's terms, each one point increase in their problem resolution measure was associated with a 26% improvement in staff perceptions of performance. Chasing the single biggest, hardest problem first, and leaving the small stuff, did not work nearly as well.
• Work areas where a senior manager took personal responsibility for making sure a problem got resolved saw a 21% increase in the performance measure. Where the walk ended with a note taken and no named owner, nothing changed.

The researchers' conclusion is worth repeating almost word for word: it's the actions taken on identified problems on the walk, not the presence of leadership or management, that improves how workforce experience their work. Walking the floor, noting problems, not doing anything and then going back to your desk is not a Gemba walk. It's a photo opportunity.

What this looks like in practice

This lines up exactly with what I see in businesses, and it talks directly into the two change management steps I highlighted last week as the ones leadership most often gets wrong: removing obstacles and recognising wins. A structured, action driven, Gemba walk is the mechanism that embeds and sustains these change management steps. A well executed Gemba walk will always focus on the following:

• It goes with genuine questions, not a checklist to tick off. "What's slowing you down right now?" beats a compliance walk every time.
• Small, easy fixes get actioned fast, even ahead of bigger ones. Visible momentum matters more early on than chasing the single highest value problem.
• There must be an action focus - every problem raised gets a responsible person and a target date, ideally someone senior enough to actually remove the obstacle, not just note it.
• The loop closes. The person who raised the problem gets told what happened, even if the answer is that it couldn't be fixed and why.
• It never turns into an audit. The moment a Gemba walk starts to feel like an inspection, people stop telling you the truth, and you've lost the only thing the walk was for.

None of this requires new software, capital expenditure or a bigger budget. It requires treating the walk as the start of a small, trackable commitment, not the end of a leadership box-ticking exercise. That's the same thread running through everything I've written so far: the tool or the technique was never the hard part. Following through on what it shows you is.

Sources

Tucker, A.L. and Singer, S.J. (2015), "The Effectiveness of Management-By-Walking-Around: A Randomized Field Study," Production and Operations Management, Vol. 24, No. 3.

Leadership by Example - If Leadership Doesn't Walk the Talk and Live the Change, How Can They Expect the Workforce to do so?

Published 8 September 2026

A large proportion of articles and blogs on lean and operational excellence emphasizes tools and techniques, such as value stream maps, DMAIC, statistical process control and short interval control. But in more than twenty years of planning and implementing operational excellence programmes in the workforce and in the boardroom, I've seen more programmes fail from something much simpler than a lack of tools and techniques: executive leadership said one thing and did another, and the workforce noticed.

I touched on this in my first blog, where the research behind my MBA dissertation showed a clear pattern in an operational excellence change programme, measured against Kotter's eight step change management model. The stages that worked well were the visible stages: building urgency, setting the vision, communicating it. The two stages that consistently let teams down were due to uncommitted leadership: not removing the obstacles standing in the way of new ways of working, and not visibly recognising the wins along the way. Workforce and management surveys said the same thing: the case for change was clear, but executive leadership did not provide support for the clearing of the obstacles for the programme to succeed; and did not ensure any recognition and celebration of small wins.

A workforce will attend all presentations on operational excellence programmes when the usual initial startup hype requires them to do so. But how will they believe in the programmes, and actually embrace the changes required for the programmes to succeed?.

Leadership do not give their workforces credit; the workforces are much more astute and observant than what leadership thinks. Workforce behaviour mirrors leadership behaviour – if leadership does not embrace and live the changes required by the programme (colloquially – “walk the talk”), this is soon observed by the workforce, who then start to question the motivation of leadership for the programme. Ultimately, this leads to lack of confidence and trust in leadership from the workforce.

This “lip service” by leadership in removing obstacles is not a single, isolated event. It's a manager who signs off on a new standard and then quietly reverts to the old shortcut under deadline pressure by leadership to meet productivity targets quickly. It's a shift supervisor who was never trained on the new visual management board (due to leadership declining training resource requirements and/or demanding improbable timelines), and simply stops using it. It's a plant manager who talks about continuous improvement at the town hall and is never once seen on the floor asking a team what's slowing them down, and what needs to be done. Every one of those moments is small. The workforce adds them up faster than leadership ever notices..

This isn't just a workforce impression. It shows up in research on why improvement initiatives fail.

• McKinsey's cited research pegs the failure rate of organisational change programmes at around 70%, attributing the high failure rate mainly to employee resistance and a lack of visible management support, not to the technical content of the change.
• On the positive side, McKinsey also found that organisations where leadership clearly defines roles and consistently communicates progress are as much as eight times more likely to see a change programme succeed.

Every successful operational excellence programme I’ve worked with has had executive leadership who recognized that their buy in and living the change process required, was vital to the success of the programme (and to the success of the business) . Conversely, I’ve worked with executives who expect that the success of an operational excellence program is solely dependent on their inhouse operational excellence specialist (or external consultant), and does not require their intervention, or more crucially, changes in their ways of working. These were the operational excellence programmes which fell flat and did not achieve any sustainable improvement for the business.

Very few leaders intentionally undermine an operational excellence programme they've just funded. It's about whether commitment is visible in behaviour, not just stated in a kickoff presentation. In practice, that comes down to a short list of unglamorous habits:

• Showing up in the workforce regularly enough that a visit isn't an event, and asking questions rather than only inspecting.
• Removing obstacles the workforce have flagged, quickly enough that the workforce notices the connection between raising it and it being fixed.
• Holding managers accountable for reverting to the old ways of work, exactly as consistently as holding workforce teams accountable.
• Recognising wins publicly, specifically and timeously, not folding it into a generic end of quarter results presentation.
• Sitting through the boring parts, the data review, the standard work audit, not just the launch event and the results slide.

None of this requires a bigger budget or a more sophisticated methodology. It requires leadership treating the change as their own discipline to model, not an initiative to sponsor and delegate. The realization by leadership of their crucial role, more than any tool in the operational excellence toolbox, is what separates the programmes that make a visible difference to the long term sustainability of the business, from the ones that quietly disappear from the next town hall agenda.

Sources

McKinsey & Company, "Changing change management," and "How to double the odds that your change program will succeed."

Why Change Programmes Are Not Sustainable: What the Data Says About the Ones That Do

Published 1 September 2026

Most businesses can point to a change or improvement programme that delivered results on launch day and quietly faded within eighteen months. The uncomfortable truth, backed by structured research into one such programme, is that even well resourced initiatives often only partially succeed when measured against a full set of performance indicators, not just the ones chosen as indicators of success.

The research, conducted by Collin for an MBA dissertation, tracked two linked change interventions against Kotter's eight step change model, then checked the results against real workforce KPIs rather than only using programme survey results alone. The pattern that emerged was consistent: of the workforce KPIs chosen up front as measures of success, roughly three in four showed statistically significant improvement. Of the wider set of KPIs that were tracked but never singled out as "indicators of improvement", fewer than four in ten did. Attention, as it turns out, is focused on "indicators of success"; everything else is not regarded as success indicators.

Mapped stage by stage, the change process told the same story. Building urgency, assembling a guiding coalition, setting the vision and communicating it landed well, and so did the later discipline of not letting up and anchoring new behaviour into how the business operates. The two stages that consistently let teams down sat in the middle of the model: removing the obstacles standing in the way of new ways of working, and visibly recognising the short term wins along the way. Workforce teams and their managers said the same thing in their individual surveys: the plan was clear and the case for change was clear, but not enough effort was focused in identifying and removing barriers to implementation and execution; and the wins weren't celebrated.

The practical implication for any change management process: measure broadly, not just indicators of success, and treat "removing barriers" and "recognising wins" as disciplines built into the change plan from day one, not steps assumed to look after themselves once the technical work is done.