10 Takeaways from the Lean Summit 2026 

Last week, 528 members of the lean community gathered in Houston, Texas, for two days of learning and discussion about leadership, management systems, and AI/tech. This article brings you some of the key insights shared by speakers at this year’s event. 

1. In a disrupted world, lean is vital, but organizations need to really make it part of their DNA. 

Opening the summit, Josh Howell, LEI President, said: “In today’s volatile environment, lean is a necessity, but most organizations are still barely scratching the surface. Too often, lean is not embedded into how the organization is run, and that’s a gap we need to close.” Closing this gap requires understanding lean as a complete business system, an engine designed to deliver outcomes by continuously identifying and addressing problems.  

At the heart of a lean enterprise, according to Josh, is the relationship between value-creating systems, such as a production system, and the management system — the former being the customer of the latter. The better a value-creating system becomes at highlighting problems, the greater the demand on the management system to support problem solving in real time. Josh asked, “Are your management systems designed to meet that demand?” 

2. It’s up to leadership to create the conditions for problem solving. 

Steve Spear, lean expert and senior lecturer at MIT, contrasted two mindsets: the “woe” approach (“Why can’t we…?”) and the “wow” approach (“Isn’t it great we can…?”). Organizations, he reminded us, exist to solve problems we cannot solve alone. And problems are everywhere. Steve shared the example of two people moving a couch and reminded us that even such a simple action entails solving dozens of small problems. Imagine running an organization. 

For leaders, the question becomes: are we creating the conditions in which people’s brains can engage and solve problems? 

Steve discussed three practices that help us get into the “winning zone”: amplify problems early, slow down to make problem solving easy, and simplify problems by breaking them down. Crucially, problems can’t be solved from the top. They must be solved at the point of work, where they arise, by enabling people and teams to tackle them together. 

3. The moment you want to throw in the towel is exactly when you need to double down on your efforts. 

Reflecting on the Cleveland Clinic’s lean journey, Lisa Yerian, the Clinic’s Executive Vice President and Chief Clinical & Operational Improvement Officer, spoke openly about the struggle inherent to a transformation. “Do lean long enough, and you’ll get to the point where you’ll struggle and will want to quit.”

The team at the Cleveland Clinic experienced exactly that moment. After years of progress, COVID, massive turnover, and the loss of their CI leader caused lean efforts to stall and lean behaviors to start slipping. Lisa herself considered walking away.  

To reignite the lean flame, they did some hansei. They anchored their reflection in A3 thinking, drew from the experience of others, and took purposeful action based on what they learned. That’s how they identified the next steps in their transformation. 

This led to the creation of the Cleveland Clinic Improvement Model and, ultimately, to the introduction of a complete management system (The Cleveland Clinic Way) that became a requirement for the top 400 leaders.  

Her advice to attendees was simple: 

“When you reach the point where you don’t want to do lean anymore, don’t give up. The struggle isn’t the interruption of transformation; it is the transformation.“

4. Lean has a way of expanding through an organization — if imagined and encouraged. 

TechnipFMC’s lean transformation started in manufacturing and service operations before spreading to lean product and process development (LPPD), as the company tried to make its products smaller, cheaper, and with half as many parts. In an industry in which processes are consistently late and over budget, TechnipFMC’s demonstrated the power of lean and then started wondering whether the methodology could be brought to other parts of the business. 

Commenting on the cultural shift that the LPPD success generated, Justin Rounce, EVP and Chief Technology Officer, said: “Our story is not about technology; it’s about people and a culture shift… We asked ourselves, ‘Can we do much more with lean? Can we operate differently?'” It turns out they could run the entire company using it. 

Since then, lean has spread across the business, becoming its operating model — with over 200 active obeya rooms in the organization and around 80% of the company’s top 120 leaders supporting the lean initiative. 

This transformation and subsequent results were only possible thanks to a commitment by leaders and the engagement of people. Justin said:

“Problem solving from the ivory tower of corporate office doesn’t work, you have to go to the gemba. And there is no better way to show people appreciation than to go to their place of work.“

5. Lean can survive disruptions. 

Over the years, Nationwide’s lean transformation survived different waves of disruption. A few years ago, for example, the company decentralized. While improvement efforts withered in certain parts of the business, where the methodology hadn’t taken root yet, they survived in others. 

Then came Covid, but Nationwide was able to quickly transition from a physical “control room” to a digitalized value-stream mapping thanks to clear metrics and the leader standard work they put in place from top to bottom and across functions. (Echoing what Josh Howell had said earlier in the day, Guru Vasudeva, Nationwide SVP and CIO, encouraged the audience to work on the production system and the management system at the same time.) This was also behind the survival of lean following a recent leadership change, when Guru moved on from Infrastructure and Operations to run the Property and Casualty department. 

Another reason behind the the company’s ability to sustain its lean system is its network of pollinators. “People want to be part of something successful. Create momentum with your group of believers and others will soon join,” Guru told the Summit audience in Houston.  

6. There is no transformation without leadership transformation. 

Roderick Vitangcol and Rich Florio, both Physicians-in-Chief at Kaiser Permanente, shared their journey of personal transformation, and explained how a shift in leadership mindset become an enabler of the incredible results the organization is achieving in Northern California (which include earlier access to physicians, saving more than 1,500 lives thanks to early cancer detection, and closing over 1 million care gaps annually). 

According to Roderick and Rich, leaders need to overcome three challenges if they are to help accelerate an organization’s journey. 

First, there is a leadership challenge: executives should confront how their behaviors can enable or inhibit progress. Rich discussed how difficult it is to admit you as a leader are the problem, in that you are the one shaping everybody else’s behaviors.  

Second, ownership is challenge. Roderick said: “I felt we were on a train going at full speed, but the organization wasn’t ready to move that fast. That’s when I realized I had to be the conductor of the train, choosing the speed and making sure the tracks were clear.” Leaders must own the lean system, develop people, and push decisions to where the information is (the frontline).  

Finally, there is a sustainability challenge: executives need to stick to lean to ensure the system doesn’t fade away but outlives them. “The hardest part of the work isn’t starting the work; it’s staying with it,” Rich said. 

7. AI is a huge opportunity, but we need to dive deeper into how it interacts with lean thinking. 

There was a lot of talk about AI and tech at this year’s Lean Summit. One recurring theme was the deep connection that exists between lean and technology. Art Smalley, LEI faculty member, Toyota veteran, and author, said this goes all the way back to Toyota, where tech played a huge role in the development of the Toyota Production System. Gene Kim, Founder of IT Revolution, brought the perspective of the DevOps community, telling the audience that the “fingertips of lean are all over the work we have done.” In discussing the infinite potential of “vibe coding,” which augments the capabilities and speed of every software engineer, Gene warned us that the entire economy will reshape around AI, making it the “biggest leadership challenge ever.”  

Indeed, the adoption of AI seems unavoidable, but businesses need to ensure they do it with full awareness of the risks. During a session run by the faculty members of the newly announced Lean Tech Initiative by the Lean Enterprise Institute, Steven Pereira, who leads flow engineering for the initiative, shared a word of caution: Art Smalley chimed in, reminding people that “AI is a tool; you need to do the thinking for it to lead to kaizen.”  

This was echoed by the experience of Grainger. Jonny LeRoy, CTO, told Summit attendees that AI is powerful — he called it “the LLM that changed the world” (a reference lean practitioners surely appreciated) and likened it to having an “army of interns” at our disposal — but urged organizations to give this new technology structure. “You need to rethink your processes before sprinkling them with AI pixie dust,” he said. And isn’t this sort of structure-giving one of the things that lean does best? Jonny also encouraged attendees to understand AI’s failure modes, so we can provide the right oversight. AI and continuous improvement may just be a natural match, and that’s why, according to Jonny, we need technologists and lean practitioners to come together. 

8. There is no industry in which lean and AI, together, can’t generate positive outcomes. 

Over the years, UMass Memorial Health has been working hard to become a lean enterprise. Its management system ensures that top management cascades goals and that people at the frontline provide ideas to achieve those goals. The result has been over 200,000 staff ideas implemented to date, which have greatly contributed to the improvement of the organization’s performance, including its financial performance as indicated by its greatly improved bond rating, and of the care the healthcare system provides. 

But this may not be enough. “There is a systemic supply crisis in U.S. healthcare. We need to care for more people with fewer resources. Bringing together Lean and AI is the way to do it,” said Eric Dickson, UMass President and CEO.  

Thanks to its extraordinary capability for data computing, AI can help care providers make better decisions. Therefore, UMass is determined to develop the AI readiness of its people (offering specific training and assigning an “AI Ninja” to each department). 

However, according to Eric, it’s important to avoid pushing AI onto people. “The future is coming hard and fast. If you are not dealing with it, you are in trouble,” Eric commented. “But AI tools are only as good as the data we feed them. We have to stay true to lean principles. The way to go is AI + A3.” (A formula, by the way, that made Art Smalley openly admit to a “man crush” on Eric.) 

9. As lean practitioners, we sometimes feel like Martians, but it’s precisely our unique way of thinking that allows us to succeed. 

Marco Lopez, CEO, shared the incredible transformation of Dreamplace Hotels & Resorts in the Canary Islands. The company understood early on the cross-functional nature of its problems (remember, the customer — or guest — doesn’t care about your silos; they only care about the outcomes your processes generate) and has therefore empowered cross-functional “subgroups” to lead problem-solving at the frontline. “Corporate gives them the what, and the subgroup decides the how. We believe that when we let people participate, they engage. And when they engage, they sustain the system,” Marco said. 

By bringing problem solving to the frontline, developing change agents, teaching leaders to manage their ego, and enabling knowledge sharing (for instance, through their successful Lean Days), Dreamplace is rethinking hospitality. The results speak for themselves: the company achieved reduced employee turnover, higher customer loyalty, and 15-20% lower costs than their competitors. 

Marco’s last slide showed a picture of Mars. “Back home, we sometimes feel like the Martians, the weird ones, but lean is the path we have chosen for our organization. And it’s working for us,” he said. 

10. There is a role that’s critical to the success of a transformation, but few outside Toyota recognize its importance 

“It’s impossible to do TPS without the team leader,” said Jamie Bonini, Toyota Production System Support Center (TSSC), to the Lean Summit audience. This person leads a team of four to six people. Its role entails maintaing output; writing, confirming, and improving the standardized work; training people; and solving the problems that arise on the line in a high-speed environment. 

Because this is an off-line position, some struggle to understand its value and even consider it overhead. Michele Thomas, Manager at TSSC, explained why this isn’t the case: “Just because they work off-line doesn’t mean team leaders are waste. The opposite is true. Someone needs to be available to respond to the problems that arise, and management needs to understand the importance of this role.” A team leader is a highly skilled person, who knows how to do every single job on the line and who can effectively train newcomers. To put it in Josh Howell’s terms, the team leader is the enabler of high-volume real-time problem solving on the line, thus allowing the management system to respond to the demand for problem solving generated by the production system.