In his early twenties, David Bovis watched a textbook Lean transformation at a manufacturing site in Basildon.
It was everything you could wish for.
Years later he went back to visit friends there. They warned him he wouldn’t believe what it looked like now and the dream turned into a nightmare.
It had all reverted to batch manufacturing.
When he asked why, the answer was simple. They had never believed in it in the first place.
David, who now teaches leaders about neuroscience through his company Duxinaroe, shared that story as part of the LCS Conference 2026 panel. It captures the people side of continuous improvement better than any framework: The tools were all there, but the belief never was.
“If you don’t specifically target that and get that to happen, everything else is window dressing.” David Bovis, Duxinaroe
The problem in continuous improvement so often, is that change doesn’t stick. Bart van Waes, founder of Leanprofs, showed delegates that success rates for organisational change range from roughly 12% to 35% depending on how success is defined, drawing on research from McKinsey, BCG, Gartner and Bain. Interestingly, the often-quoted “70% of change fails” figure has no valid empirical basis, according to a 2011 review in the Journal of Change Management.
Whatever the exact number, the reason is rarely the technology. As Bart put it, people themselves decide whether change succeeds.
David made the same point through an old acronym: people, process, systems. We can talk about systems in terms of code and software, and about process down to the second of takt time. But when it comes to people, we reach for an engagement survey or a net promoter score. What about the mechanism of how humans actually work? He calls it the human operating system, one that has to work alongside every other system in the business.
Catrin Archer, who leads the Lean Competency System, put it more simply: “You can have as many tools and bells and whistles and AI as you like, but culture is a human thing.”
Every person in an organisation is constantly working out what to do next to stay safe and succeed. David described it vividly: if you have 5,000 people, you have 5,000 supercomputers all making that assessment at once.
If improvement doesn’t make sense from where they’re standing, people won’t commit to it and when their targets point one way and the change points another, people pull in different directions. Leaders see resistance and over time, it becomes disengagement.
So the question that matters isn’t whether the method is sound. It’s whether people can see why it matters to them. As one delegate wrote on the LCS post-it board: “If you really want to build CI culture, always focus on what’s in it for them.”
Linda Spinks, Continuous Improvement Leader at the University of Cambridge, learned this on her own Lean Six Sigma Black Belt course. She was the only person there from higher education and the only one from a not-for-profit. Most of what she was taught, she realised, “would never, never translate.” So she wrote her own course.
“Use the terminology and the language that is appropriate and relevant, and the tools that are appropriate and relevant to the organisation within which you’re working.” Linda Spinks, University of Cambridge
Leon Hardwick, who came into CI from the technology sector, also recognised the problem. Tech, he admitted, is the master of acronyms that sound cool but baffle people. Coming into CI with fresh eyes, he had a whole new dictionary to learn.
Jargon makes improvement feel like a specialist club. Plain language makes it something everyone can own.
All of that raises an important question. If belief matters so much, how do you change it? Bart’s answer was to simply stop trying to change people directly and change their environment instead. He quoted Peter Senge: “People don’t resist change. They resist being changed.”
Bart described two environments that shape behaviour. The physical one is made of processes, tools, workplaces, systems and time. The social one is made of communication, role models and norms. He defines change management as shaping that environment, which in turn shapes how people behave.
Lean organisations are already good at prompts that get behaviour started: visual management, andon, 5S, standard work. They’re often far less deliberate about what happens afterwards. As one of Bart’s slides put it, “Antecedents get behavior started, but consequences keep it going.”
Think about what happens when someone stops a line to flag a problem. A raised eyebrow teaches one lesson. A thank you teaches another.
Oliver Conger whose closing keynote charted his manufacturing business’s journey from crisis to Lean exemplar explained his journey, highlighting people made the difference. When his team met their Toyota mentor, Kenny Barlow, Oliver had prepared a meeting room for a presentation. Kenny wasn’t interested. He asked what their problems were, then went to see the biggest one.
“He never told us anything,” Oliver said. “He just asked the questions and the team changed because of their experience.”
It’s an approach Toyota used to turn around the NUMMI plant in California, once considered one of the worst in the US. Oliver played a clip of Mr Yoshino, who helped lead that change, explaining that they deliberately avoided the words “teach” and even “coach”. Instead they showed people what they were doing and let them decide what to change.
Hilti AMS won the Culture of Improvement award at the LCS Awards 2026 for an approach built around people. Its award entry describes the mindset shifts it has seen across around 1,500 employees: from escalation to ownership, from compliance to curiosity, and from a few experts to many contributors.
Improvement campaigns give employees “permission to learn by doing,” and teams are trusted to test ideas even when the outcome is uncertain. The feedback says it all. Employees describe improvement as “easier,” “more engaging,” and “visible,” and Lean is increasingly associated with empowerment rather than control.
David returned again and again to one question:
“How do we create the conditions consciously and purposefully, in which brains can work at their best?” David Bovis
That includes leadership behaviours, the artefacts around people and the technology they use. The aim, he said, is technology and systems that “empower and give control rather than impose control.” Bart added one more element: the change agent. People who lead improvement are part of everyone else’s environment too, so their own beliefs and behaviour matter as much as their tools.
At the close of the conference, Catrin said her standout moment wasn’t a quote or a statistic. It was a photograph from Oliver’s keynote of his team at work, smiling. That, she said, is what improvement is aiming for: “giving people the capability, the permission and the time to enjoy what they do.”
The Basildon factory had every tool it needed. What it didn’t have was people who believed in them so when the people driving it moved on, the system fell over.
Methodologies, tools and technology all matter, but continuous improvement lasts when it works as a human system as well as a technical one. That means building belief, speaking people’s language and shaping an environment where the right behaviours are noticed and rewarded.
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?
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