A practitioner can recite the DMAIC cycle from memory and still freeze the first time a genuinely ambiguous problem lands on their desk. Tim Edwards, Senior Operations & Improvement Manager at LCS explores how knowing a methodology and knowing how to apply it under real conditions are different skills, and the space between them is where continuous improvement capability is actually built, or quietly lost.
That gap is more important than most capability frameworks acknowledge. A 2022 study in The TQM Journal, surveying 106 Six Sigma Master Black Belts, Black Belts, and Champions across manufacturing and service organisations, examined why operational excellence initiatives so often fail to hold once formal deployment activity winds down (Antony et al., 2022). The pattern it describes will be familiar to most CI leaders: the tools get taught, the methodology gets understood, and the capability still doesn't take root in day-to-day operations.
Every improvement methodology can be written down whether that be the steps, the templates, the decision trees. The hard part of improvement is judgement and knowing which tool fits a given situation, when to push for more data and when to act on what you already have. What is equally as important is to know how to read a room that's more anxious about change than it's letting on.
Judgement doesn't transfer through a slide deck but is built the same way judgement is built in any other discipline, through repeated exposure to situations that don't resolve neatly, with feedback close enough behind the decision to learn from it.
This is most visible at the Gemba. A practitioner observing a process alongside frontline staff will often spot a workaround, a bottleneck, or a piece of tribal knowledge that would never surface on a dashboard or a process map back in the office. That kind of pattern recognition can't be taught in the classroom; it has to be practised against a live process, with real consequences attached to getting it wrong.
The same applies to leading change. Facilitating a root-cause discussion when a team is frustrated and short on time builds more capability in an hour than several rounds of a classroom simulation, precisely because the outcome isn't already known and the room won't simply agree because the exercise says it should.
In Practice: A regional NHS trust found that its newly trained improvement leads were confident in workshops but hesitant to lead root-cause discussions on the ward. Pairing each lead with an experienced coach for their first three live investigations, rather than sending them straight back to their day job, closed that confidence gap within a single quarter.
Traditional training has largely worked on a ‘just in case’ basis. Practitioners are given the knowledge, theory and tools they might need in the future, often well before they encounter the problem that requires them. By the time that moment arrives, much of the learning may be difficult to recall and, more importantly, has never been applied in context.
A more adaptive approach moves towards ‘just in time’ learning. When a practitioner encounters a problem, the relevant learning can happen much closer to the point of application, whether through targeted content, coaching, or support from an experienced colleague. Rather than being stored as excess inventory, knowledge is acquired when there is an immediate reason to use it, then reinforced through solving the problem itself.
This doesn't mean we abandon foundational training; practitioners still need enough understanding to recognise problems and know where to start. But it does challenge the assumption that everything they might need to know has to be taught upfront.
Instead of separating training from application by weeks or months, just in time learning brings the two together. The problem becomes both the reason to learn and the opportunity to practise. This is where the outcome and value of the knowledge acquisition can truly be measured.
Some of the most valuable capability-building happens through peer discussion and shared problem-solving, exposing practitioners to perspectives and operational contexts beyond their own team or function.
Communities of practice and professional networks let people test ideas, challenge assumptions, and see how a problem they're stuck on has already been solved elsewhere. This can add most value for organisations that lack the internal scale to offer broad cross-functional exposure on their own, where a smaller CI function can otherwise start to feel isolated and reinvent solutions that already exist a few sites, or a few sectors, away.
In a classroom environment, the lean coach performs the role of facilitator and trainer, often guiding delegates towards a pre-defined outcome to ensure the simulation works. A workplace-based lean coach does something a course can't: they support someone with an actual decision, not a simulation of it, and ask the question that turns activity into learning. “What did you notice?” and “What would you do differently?” are simple prompts, but asked consistently, in real time, against real problems, they're what converts experience into transferable judgement.
This is also where experienced practitioners remain essential, even as digital tools make more of the technical work accessible to non-specialists. Lived operational judgement, the kind that spots when resistance to a change reflects genuine pressure rather than poor engagement, is a distinctly human contribution that coaching transfers far more reliably than content does.
Structured reflection is the step most commonly skipped, usually because operational pressure results in reprioritisation . A short debrief after any significant attempt, successful or not, is one of the simplest ways to build capability into daily routines rather than treating it as a separate activity competing for time.
The discipline is crucial here to ensure the event becomes habit and doesn’t fall victim to reprioritisation during times of disruption. A regular five-minute conversation about what happened and why, held consistently, will outperform an occasional lengthy retrospective that keeps getting bumped by whatever's most urgent that week.
Training gives practitioners a starting vocabulary, but capability comes from what happens next. That’s applying that vocabulary against real problems, learning alongside peers, being coached through the moments that don't go to plan, and reflecting on what actually happened rather than what the textbook said should happen.
Organisations that treat this as a deliberate, ongoing practice, rather than an outcome of the training itself, get measurably more from every improvement programme they run. Structured accreditation and professional standards help make that practice consistent rather than dependent on which team happens to have the right culture.
We explore how organisations can build this kind of system in our whitepaper, [LINK: Building Adaptive Improvement Capability Beyond the Classroom].
If your organisation is ready to formalise how it builds continuous improvement capability, find out more about LCS accreditation and membership and how the LCS Framework supports practice-based development at every level.