The LCS Global Conference 2026 opened by saying what CI teams know, but are sitting quietly on. It highlighted the reality that many CI teams are under pressure to prove their worth time and time again within their organisations. Some CI teams being named, some CI teams being restructured and some who attended the LCS Conference in 2025 no longer in existence.
Catrin Archer, Head of LCS then said something more provocative in her talk:
“I don’t necessarily think that the disappearance of CI teams is a bad thing.” - Catrin Archer
Catrin’s point wasn’t that improvement teams don’t matter, but instead that scaling continuous improvement has a very specific end goal, and it isn’t a bigger CI department. “Maybe what the aim is,” she said, “is for organisations to be able to improve.”
That changes the impact of a CI team as the real test of a continuous improvement culture isn’t how much the CI team can improve, but whether the organisation can keep improving without them.
The instinctive response to a successful improvement programme is to grow it whether that be through more practitioners, more projects, or more training. It feels and looks like scale. But as Catrin reminded delegates, taking what worked in one place and copying and pasting it somewhere else doesn’t work, and everyone in the profession knows it.
“People are not PowerPoint slides and organisations aren’t machines. Culture cannot be delivered through a rollout plan.” - Catrin Archer, LCS
Instead, she described scaling improvement as “creating the conditions in which thousands of people can think, solve problems, learn, and improve consistently without requiring the CI team to be standing by their side.”
That last part matters most. If improvement only happens when a practitioner is in the room, the organisation hasn’t scaled continuous improvement. It has simply scaled its CI team.
There is a real difference between an organisation that does improvement and one that has improvement capability.
In the first, improvement is a service. This means that problems are handed to the CI team, the team then runs a project, the result is reported and everyone moves on. It’s useful, but fragile.
In the second, improvement is part of how people work. Managers coach rather than pass problems on, team members spot issues and act on them and leaders ask what was learned, not just what was saved.
One delegate captured it on a post-it note at the end of the day: “Training creates capability but not habits.” Capability that never becomes a habit stays dependent on the people who brought it in. Our whitepaper, Building Adaptive Improvement Capability Beyond the Classroom, explores what it takes to close that gap.
Dan Capers, Head of Business Improvement at Sellafield Ltd, put the challenge plainly during the conference panel, highlighting that this was a consistent question popping up throughout the day.
“I think we all know the challenge is to get our businesses doing improvements without us.” - Dan Capers
Dan also asked a question every CI leader should sit with. If you and your team disappeared, what would happen to the improvement work? For most organisations, he suggested, the honest answer is that it would start to slip back.
That isn’t a failure of effort because good CI teams are very good at making things work. They chase actions, hold context, connect departments and keep momentum going, but the more an improvement team compensates, the more the organisation leans on it. As OpX put it in their keynote, “the improvement person had become the system.”
That dependency carries a risk that’s easy to overlook. When a key improvement leader leaves or a sponsor moves on, the organisation can lose far more than one person. It can lose the momentum, the relationships and the knowledge of what was tried and why.
Hilti After Market Services, winner of the Culture of Improvement award, set out to remove this kind of dependency. Its award entry describes deliberately moving away from relying on a small group of experts towards enabling everyone to contribute. Across 59 Tool Service Centres, four distribution centres and around 1,500 employees, more than 70 local Lean Champions now work inside operations as mentors. Over three improvement campaigns, teams completed around 1,500 improvements.
Crucially, Hilti built improvement into its people systems. Lean is part of every performance review, and leaders must be Lean-certified to be considered for further development. That, the entry says, means improvement capability “is not dependent on individual champions, but built into how leaders are assessed, developed, and promoted.” It has held up under pressure too. Through a construction market slowdown and cost pressures, participation and the value created through improvements kept rising.
So what does improvement look like when it belongs to everyone? Oliver Conger, whose closing keynote charted his manufacturing business’s journey from crisis to Lean exemplar, sets one simple expectation for every person in the business:
“You don’t come to work to do your job. You come to work to improve your job.” - Oliver Conger
That message is backed by structure. Oliver said that in their business everyone spends the first 15 minutes of the working day on improvement, whether that’s fixing a loose door handle or solving a critical issue. Improvement isn’t an extra task on top of the day. It’s built into the day.
Scaling continuous improvement is a long game and as Dan put it, it’s measured in years, not weeks and months. So it’s worth tracking whether the organisation’s own improvement capability is growing, not just how many projects the CI team has delivered. Some useful signals include:
None of these replace outcome measures, yet together they show whether improvement is becoming part of how the organisation works, or still depends on a handful of people.
The City of Jacksonville won the Scaling CI Capability award at the LCS Awards 2026 for taking continuous improvement across the largest city by land area in the United States. Its approach starts from one idea: “Capability must live where the work lives.”
Since July 2024, the city has certified 316 White Belts and 118 Green Belts across every major department. A network of 904Lean Champions runs Kaizen events in their own departments and coaches new practitioners. A standard Kaizen Event Blueprint means teams can start improvement work without waiting for approval. In the city’s words, growth “is not dependent on one team, it is self-propelling.”
The results reach right across the city: around 395,000 hours of waste eliminated since launch, and first review times for residential permits cut from 25 days to 8.
“Our competitive advantage is when improvement scales beyond CI,” Catrin told the conference. Beyond transformation teams, beyond change programmes, and into the day-to-day work of the whole organisation, where it’s owned, understood and shared.
That doesn’t make CI teams less important but changes what they’re for. The most valuable improvement teams are the ones building capability that will outlast them. They develop leaders, coach managers, create systems that keep learning connected, and step back as the organisation steps forward.
Dan admitted that many CI leaders feel nervous about stepping away and leaving the business to improve on its own. But that, he said, is exactly what they’re aiming for.
So the measure of success isn’t how much your CI team can improve. It’s how much your organisation keeps improving when the CI team isn’t in the room.
LCS accreditation gives organisations a recognised framework for developing improvement capability at every level, from team members to transformation leaders.
Through the LCS community, including monthly online networking events, you can also learn first-hand how other organisations are scaling CI. Discover all LCS community events.