In a recent episode of the Ever-So-Lean podcast, host Matt was joined by three speakers from this year's LCS Conference & Awards: Beth Lee-Wilson, who leads Continuous Improvement at the University of Manchester; Bart van Waes, founding partner of Leanprofs; and Leon Hardwick, who heads up the OpX software division within Reinvigoration Group.
The conversation offered a sneak preview of the ideas, challenges and practical insights they will be bringing to Manchester this September.
And while their backgrounds and approaches are very different, one theme came through loud and clear: scaling improvement is about much more than tools and methodologies. It is about people.
Leon is perhaps the self-confessed outsider of the three.
With almost 30 years of experience in technology, software and problem solving, he entered the Continuous Improvement world relatively recently. That fresh perspective has shaped both the development of OpX and his upcoming conference session, ABC to I.
Rather than positioning himself as another expert telling experienced CI professionals what they should do, Leon is taking a different approach.
“I'm in that room, not as an expert, but I'm in it as the person that the experts are trying to reach.”
His session will explore the lessons he has learned since entering the improvement profession and the things that may be obvious to someone looking in from the outside but are sometimes harder to see when you are deeply immersed in the discipline.
It is a perspective that reflects a wider challenge for improvement professionals: how do we make Continuous Improvement relevant, accessible and useful to the people we are trying to engage?
Leon also believes there is an opportunity to bring some of the learning from the technology and startup world into improvement.
One of the most interesting parts of the conversation was around experimentation and failure. In technology, testing ideas, learning quickly and iterating is often an accepted part of the process. In larger organisations, however, the fear of getting something wrong can stop people from trying in the first place.
As Leon put it:
“People are so scared of failure, especially in larger organisations. You only learn by putting it in front of people and sort of doing the do.”
His session promises to bring a fresh, honest and thought-provoking perspective to the conversation around how we can make improvement more accessible and easier to scale.
Beth Lee-Wilson has spent nearly 15 years working with Lean and has a dual background in Continuous Improvement and organisational change management.
Her focus at the University of Manchester is a challenge that will be familiar to many improvement leaders: how do you move beyond isolated pockets of improvement and create a genuine culture of Continuous Improvement across an organisation?
It is one thing to have passionate individuals and successful projects in individual teams or departments. But how do you make sure that learning, capability and success spread?
As Beth explained:
“These sorts of improvements, these transformations, if you will, they're not driven by tools. They're driven by people.”
Her interactive conference session will explore what it takes to move from isolated improvement activity to organisation-wide capability.
Using a simulation, Beth will encourage attendees to think about how they can scale improvement while balancing immediate results with the longer-term challenge of building capability, sharing learning and creating visibility of the benefits being delivered.
Importantly, the session is designed for a broad audience. Whether you are relatively new to improvement or have decades of experience, Beth hopes attendees will leave with at least one idea they can immediately put into practice.
And true to her approach to learning, don't expect three hours of slides.
Beth is a firm believer in learning through doing.
“It's giving people an opportunity to not receive information passively, but to actually start to think about how am I engaging with this and how does it relate to what I'm actually doing in real life?”
Her session will bring this philosophy to life, giving delegates the opportunity to explore the challenges of scaling improvement in a practical and engaging way.
Bart van Waes, founder of Leanprofs, helps organisations improve performance through behaviour-driven Lean, collaboration, and human-centred visual management.
For Bart van Waes, one of the biggest challenges facing organisations is that change has become unnecessarily complicated.
Working with large organisations across sectors including utilities, healthcare and government, Bart sees teams working incredibly hard to improve, often without achieving the lasting results they hoped for.
Too often, he argues, organisations take a highly complicated, top-down approach to change.
His response has been to develop a practical five-step approach to creating easier and more sustainable change.
At the heart of his thinking is a simple but powerful idea:
“If we use a new tool and our behaviour stays the same, well, I don't think there can be a lasting performance improvement.”
Bart's session will take attendees through his five steps and give them the opportunity to apply the approach to their own examples and challenges.
The wider conversation also explored why people resist change in the first place. As the group discussed, it is not necessarily that people dislike change. More often, they dislike having change done to them.
As Bart highlighted:
“People don't resist change, they resist being changed.”
For anyone struggling to turn improvement initiatives into lasting changes in the way people think and work, Bart's session promises to offer a refreshingly practical perspective.
The conversation between Beth, Bart and Leon covered a huge amount of ground, but several common themes emerged.
Improvement cannot be scaled through tools alone.
Technology can provide structure, visibility and support. Methodologies can provide frameworks. But neither will create lasting change unless people understand, engage with and ultimately adopt new ways of working.
The group also explored the importance of simplicity.
If something feels too complicated, people will naturally find the path of least resistance and revert to what they have always done. If we want new behaviours to stick, we need to make them easier to adopt.
And perhaps most importantly, we need to become more comfortable with experimentation and failure.
Continuous Improvement, by its very nature, means trying, learning and adapting. Yet many organisations still have cultures where getting something wrong is seen as something to hide rather than an opportunity to learn.
As Beth put it:
“The value that you get from things when they go wrong can often be significantly more than when they go right.”
That willingness to challenge traditional thinking, share different perspectives and explore new approaches is exactly what the LCS Conference & Awards is all about.
Join Beth, Bart, Leon and a fantastic line-up of improvement leaders and practitioners at the LCS Conference & Awards 2026 in Manchester.
Come for the ideas. Take away practical insights. Connect with people facing the same challenges. And perhaps most importantly, leave with new thinking that you can put into practice in your own organisation.