Eighteen months in, everything is going well. Senior leaders want improvement rolled out across the whole organisation.
Then the budget is cut.
Your senior sponsor leaves and two of your best practitioners move into new roles.
What survives?
That was the scenario Beth Lee Wilson, Senior CI Manager at the University of Manchester, put to delegates at the LCS Conference 2026. Working as improvement leadership teams with limited resources, they had to decide where to invest: quick-win projects, training, developing leaders, or building systems that make improvement routine. Then the shocks arrived, and they found out which choices held.
For many people in the room, it wasn’t a game. It was a description of the last few years. And it gets to the heart of sustaining continuous improvement: early enthusiasm is never enough.
Dan Capers, Head of Business Improvement at Sellafield Ltd, knows how long this takes. Sellafield has been on its improvement journey for around 25 years, and Dan has led it for the last six.
“Most of us know it’s a long game. It’s measured in years, not weeks and months.”
Dan Capers, Sellafield Ltd
Programmes lose momentum for predictable reasons. The initial excitement fades, so Dan’s advice is to expect to create new excitement every so often. Problems move too. Improve one part of a process and the constraint shifts somewhere else. And people move. As Dan pointed out, senior leaders often move on every four years or so, to new roles or new companies.
Sponsorship came up again and again. Linda Spinks, Continuous Improvement Leader at the University of Cambridge, described how quickly things can change when leadership changes: if you can’t find new senior advocates, “you are left high and dry really. And with very little you can do about it.”
Dan was also clear about what doesn’t help. Getting angry with leaders who don’t “get it” changes nothing. It’s the CI team’s job, he said, to help leaders create the culture, and that means understanding what motivates them. That motivation won’t stay the same either. “What will motivate them now might be different in two years,” he said. “Don’t be afraid to experiment and keep changing, and expect the problem to move.”
Beth’s exercise made one distinction very clear. Projects build early results and credibility, and they matter. But projects alone don’t survive a budget cut or a change of sponsor.
Training extends reach and reduces reliance on specialists. Leadership development and systems are what make improvement last beyond changes in people or budgets. Or, as Tim Edwards puts it in our whitepaper, quoted in Beth’s session: “capability is shaped by the organisational conditions leaders repeatedly reinforce.”
That’s the shift from running a programme to building a capability. A programme has an end date. A capability becomes part of how the organisation works.
Sustaining improvement also means sustaining support for it. Allison McLean of Computacenter described how relentless that is. Customers always want things faster, cheaper or more automated. A great year last year buys you very little this year.
“You’re never going to be a one and done… it’s just going to be a continual cycle of continual improvement.” Allison McLean, Computacenter
That means regular evidence, in terms leaders recognise, rather than a big annual push. We explore this in more depth in this blog 2 of the series - Can You Prove the Value of Continuous Improvement?
Sometimes momentum is lost not because there’s too little improvement activity, but because there’s too much.
Oliver Conger, whose manufacturing business has transformed through Lean, described one of the first pieces of feedback from his leadership coach. There was improvement work happening in welding, in the sales office and everywhere in between. “You’ve got too many experiments in your organisation, it can’t absorb it” the coach told him. His advice was to slow down and agree as a team what really mattered.
Oliver’s business now measures a lot, but only displays what’s relevant to that quarter or month, and changes what it measures as priorities shift. His leadership team recently agreed a single objective to focus on until Christmas.
Improvement is much harder to sustain in isolation. Opening the conference, Catrin Archer, who leads the Lean Competency System, said one of the strongest trends LCS is seeing is a growing appetite for community. CI professionals often work in small teams, and many are looking beyond their own organisations to learn from others.
Inside organisations, communities of practice do a similar job. At the University of Cambridge, Linda described deliberately making sure CI “wasn’t a dark art”, keeping it accessible to everyone, and setting up a community of practice for CI. Communities like that keep knowledge and energy circulating when individuals move on.
Learning from outside matters too. Oliver estimated that 99% of what his business has learned came from copying others. As one delegate wrote on the LCS post-it board: “The CI community is a huge source of learning.”
The National Deaf Children’s Society was named Organisation of the Year at the LCS Awards 2026. Two years ago, the charity had no formal Lean capability. Today it has a growing community of trained practitioners, with more than 130 staff trained at Lean 1A, 50 at 1B and 15 at 1C.
The results matter most to the families it supports. After a redesign of its Frontline Services involving more than 100 staff, families now receive support in under two days on average. Lead times for CRM changes have fallen from more than three months to under one month.
What impressed the judges was how NDCS built for the long term. Lean is now part of quarterly planning, the charity has invested in a dedicated team to grow its programme, and the voice of families runs through its improvement work. Staff are more confident, and families get a more consistent experience.
If the problems keep moving, improvement has to move with them. Methods that worked five years ago may not fit the challenges organisations face today, especially as AI and automation reshape how work gets done.
That applies to the profession as well as to individual programmes. LCS is refreshing its own framework to make sure it equips CI professionals for the next decade. As Catrin asked delegates: what capabilities, skills, tools and methods will people actually need in five to ten years?
Continuous improvement isn’t a project with a finish line. The organisations that sustain it accept that, plan for the shocks, and keep building the capability to adapt. The improvement never ends, and that’s the point.
This article is part of our series on the big themes from the LCS Conference 2026. Read the first: Scaling Continuous Improvement: What Happens When Your CI Team Disappears?
LCS accreditation helps organisations build lasting improvement capability at every level, so improvement survives changes in people, priorities and budgets.
Go deeper in our whitepaper, Building Adaptive Improvement Capability Beyond the Classroom, and join the LCS community to learn from others on the same journey.