Four Moments from the 2026 Lean Summit that Stayed with Me 

I hadn’t attended one of LEI’s lean conferences in over five years. The last one was right before the COVID outbreak shut everything down, and I was honestly curious about what I would find when I walked into the 2026 Lean Summit in Houston on March 11–13 this past week. Would the community feel the same? Would the conversations have moved forward? Would there be energy, or just nostalgia? 

What I found exceeded my expectations. The room was full of first-time attendees alongside seasoned practitioners. The lean message is still reaching people, and it is attracting them across industries, continents, and stages of their journey. That alone was encouraging. Whatever challenges the lean community faces, relevance is not one of them. 

I also delivered a half-day workshop on Problem Solving and AI, and I was genuinely surprised by the response. The overwhelming reaction from participants was something along the lines of: “I can go home on Monday and immediately have something to do with AI.” People felt like they could steer the large language models in ways that were not possible before and produce useful outputs right away. (Jim Womack, LEI Founder, often said that lean learnings should help learners determine what to do on Monday morning.) We have some exciting AI-augmented problem-solving skills to share in the coming weeks and months that I think people will find practical and valuable. 

But this article isn’t about my workshop. It’s about four moments from the Summit that stayed with me, in no particular order, each one reinforcing something fundamental about lean thinking of which I needed to be reminded.  

Paulo Couto and the Power of Lean Product and Process Development 

Paulo Couto, Senior Vice President of Industrialization and Quality at TechnipFMC, received a lifetime achievement award from LEI for his contributions to lean innovation. If you are not familiar with Paulo’s work, you should be. Over the past two decades, he and his team in Brazil have done a remarkable job improving product and process development for some of the most complex engineered systems on the planet: subsea production systems that operate at depths of up to 10,000 feet on the ocean floor. 

Paulo led the development of TechnipFMC’s Subsea 2.0 program, which achieved dramatic reductions in size, weight, part count, and lead time, roughly 50% across all dimensions. This wasn’t incremental improvement. It was a fundamental rethinking of how to design and deliver complex engineered products using lean product and process development (LPPD) principles, obeya management, chief engineer leadership, and rigorous problem solving. The results have been so significant that they transformed TechnipFMC’s competitive position in the global subsea industry. 

This award was important to me for a reason that goes beyond Paulo’s personal achievement, which is considerable. Product and process development is so fundamental to the success of Toyota throughout its history that it sometimes surprises me how little attention it receives in the lean community. People forget that the product development chapter in The Machine That Changed the World1 was the largest chapter in the book. The factory chapter was the smallest. Yet in my experience, the lean community gets this relative importance wrong in many cases, gravitating heavily toward production system topics and underweighting the development side of the equation. Paulo’s work at TechnipFMC, deploying lean thinking in the harshest operating conditions imaginable, is a powerful reminder that LPPD can produce extraordinary results. Congratulations to Paulo on a well-deserved recognition. 

Lisa Yerian on Purpose and Why Leaders Come to Work  

Lisa Yerian, Chief Improvement Officer at the Cleveland Clinic, gave a presentation that I loved. She shared a deeply personal and emotional example of how she found her purpose at work and the value of what the Clinic provides to patients and families. 

Lisa reflected on a colleague’s experience involving a complex diagnosis that led to an unnecessary operation, which resulted in a patient fatality. That is about as sobering as it gets. That kind of reality can make anyone question their actions. But instead of retreating, they reflected and worked to ensure that type of mistake would never happen again. The Cleveland Clinic has been named to the U.S. News & World Report Best Hospitals Honor Roll for 35 consecutive years and was ranked the No. 2 hospital in the world by Newsweek for the seventh consecutive year.2 Those rankings do not happen by accident. They happen because people like Lisa and her colleagues face the hardest moments in healthcare with honesty and turn them into systematic improvement. 

Too often in the lean community, we spend our time arguing about the mechanics: the right way to run a daily stand-up meeting, how to design a pull system, or whether a standardized work chart should look a certain way. Those things matter, but Lisa reminded us of something more fundamental. Lean rests on two pillars: Continuous Improvement and Respect for People. And Respect for People starts with leaders understanding their own motivation and purpose for being there. Before you can effectively lead others through improvement, you need to understand on a personal level why you come into work every day. It was a presentation that reminded me that purpose is not just a box on the Lean Transformation Framework. It is the starting point for everything else.  

Eric Dickson on the Leadership Journey from Expert to Coach 

Eric Dickson, President and CEO of UMass Memorial Health, shared the details of his personal improvement journey and how lean has affected his leadership style. Eric’s background makes this story particularly compelling. He served as a combat medic in the United States Army Reserve, and he trained as an emergency medicine physician. In those environments, you learn to take charge, solve problems fast, and save lives in the golden hour of medicine. That skill set is critical, and nobody would argue otherwise. 

However, Eric shared candidly that in many other situations, a different approach is needed. You also have to slow down, reflect, observe, and get other people to lead their own work. The shift from expert problem solver to someone who develops others to solve problems is one of the hardest transitions in leadership, and Eric navigated it successfully at UMass Memorial. He showed how he engaged people at every level to lead and improve their own areas, producing remarkable improvement with genuine pride in ownership. 

And then Eric shared that his two main themes for improvement in 2026 at UMass Memorial are AI and A3 thinking. As I joked to the audience, I think I have a new “man crush.” The combination of disciplined problem solving through A3 thinking with the augmentation potential of AI is exactly the direction I believe healthcare and every other industry should be heading. Eric gets it. 

Gene Kim and the Future of Cognitive Work Improvement 

Gene Kim, Founder of IT Revolution, gave an excellent presentation about his improvement work in the field of DevOps and the community of improvement thinkers he has been building. Gene is the bestselling author of The Phoenix Project, The DevOps Handbook, and most recently Vibe Coding,3 co-authored with Steve Yegge, which explores how AI-assisted coding is transforming software development. 

Gene is a stretch example of what is occurring with AI in the IT space, and I will be honest: I doubt that we in the more traditional lean community are fully ready for it. Lean has typically been applied to physical work, some engineering work, and certain administrative processes. With the advent of large language models, however, we can suddenly apply lean thinking and improvement rapidly at scale to cognitive work in a way that we have never achieved before. Gene has been at the forefront of this shift, and he has kindly involved me in his community and personally helped me learn how to use AI coding tools at an agentic level.  

We can suddenly apply lean thinking and improvement rapidly at scale to cognitive work in a way that we have never achieved before. 

Let me share a small example from the conference itself that illustrates where this might be heading. I shared a new online version of LEI’s Lean Lexicon that we built. During the Summit, we allowed participants to submit improvement ideas for the tool overnight. Those ideas went into a database in the cloud and were reviewed and evaluated by an AI agent. I approved the top idea submitted, and an AI coding agent then created the new feature in about 10 minutes, ran quality checks, and deployed it to the website automatically. It was an automatic PDCA cycle acting on instructions from a human.  

This frankly makes me nervous. But think about what it represents: an easy way to collect feedback from an entire organization (respect for people), evaluate it systematically, and execute certain types of improvement more rapidly than we have ever been able to do before. We do not yet know how this is going to turn out. But it could help accelerate any type of PDCA cycle in the future. Ready or not, this type of cognitive work improvement is going to occur more and more. We just need to practice it along with respect for people at every level of the organization. 

Looking Ahead 

These four moments reinforced something I keep coming back to. Technology alone does not transform anything. Paulo’s work succeeds because of leadership and disciplined development processes. Lisa’s message resonates because purpose drives everything that follows. Eric’s journey matters because developing people is harder and more important than deploying tools. And Gene’s vision challenges us because applying improvement thinking to cognitive work is the next frontier, whether we are ready or not. 

Technology alone does not transform anything. Paulo’s work succeeds because of leadership and disciplined development processes. 

I recently wrote the article series Impact = Technology × Behavior × Management. The Summit reminded me that all three factors were alive and well in this community. We have some exciting work to share in the coming months on how AI can augment problem-solving skills without doing the thinking for you. Stay tuned. 

Humans + AI > Problems.  

LeanTech is an LEI initiative dedicated to helping organizations apply lean practice to the technology layer of their operations. This effort is led by Tyson Heaton, Executive Director, and anchored by a faculty of practitioners whose work spans Toyota production systems, enterprise software transformation, AI-enabled lean coaching tools, and technology-native lean practice. At its core, the initiative rests on a straightforward premise: the same discipline that made lean thinking effective in operations and supply chains (understand the work, build capability in people, improve continuously) is now both applicable and necessary in the technology environments encountered by nearly every modern organization. 

1 James P. Womack Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos, The Machine that Changed the World (Rawson Associates, 1990). 

2 Cleveland Clinic was named to the U.S. News & World Report Best Hospitals Honor Roll for the 35th consecutive year in 2025 and ranked No. 2 hospital in the world by Newsweek for the seventh consecutive year. Cleveland Clinic Newsroom, “State of the Clinic,” January 26, 2026. 

3 Gene Kim and Steve Vegge, Vibe Coding (IT Revolution, 2025).