Olaf Boettger recently shared something that caught my attention: "You can see continuous improvement culture in 30 seconds or less." He followed it with a blunt, experience-backed pattern from 27 years in continuous improvement: "I don’t start with the KPI board. I don’t start with the A3. I don’t start with the slide deck. I go to Gemba."

That framing matters because it flips a common instinct. When results lag, leaders often reach for more tools, more templates, and more tracking. Olaf is arguing that you can diagnose the health of your improvement culture faster by watching behavior in the room than by reading anything on the wall.

The 30-second culture audit: what the room reveals

Olaf described two workshop scenes with the same agenda and completely different outcomes.

On one side: people sitting, arms crossed, laptops open, neutral faces. Everyone is present, no one is engaged.

On the other: people standing, walls covered with ideas, passionate conversations, visible collaboration.

"Templates rarely kill improvement. Leadership behaviour does."

That single line is the heart of the post. Tools are not irrelevant, but tools are rarely the constraint. The constraint is the social system around the work: the signals leaders send, the safety people feel, and whether the group is actually thinking together.

If you want a quick diagnostic at Gemba, look for these signals:

Are people oriented toward the work (process, customer, flow) or toward their screens?
Are ideas visible and evolving, or are slides polished and static?
Are questions being asked across functions, or is everyone defending their silo?
Is the energy exploratory ("let’s figure it out") or performative ("let’s look busy")?

Why engagement beats tools in continuous improvement

I agree with Olaf’s sequencing: before you ask "Are we using the right tool?" ask "Have we created the right engagement?" Because real improvement requires people to do at least three hard things:

Admit the current state is not good enough.
Challenge assumptions (including leadership’s assumptions).
Change behavior in daily work, not just on workshop day.

None of that happens with folded arms.

When engagement is missing, teams tend to fall into predictable failure modes that Olaf called out:

Participants think only from their own function’s perspective.
Leaders defend past decisions.
Participants wait to be told the answer.

Notice how none of those are tool problems. They are relationship and leadership problems.

The hidden cost of "neutral faces" workshops

A neutral room can look polite and orderly. It can also be a sign of learned helplessness. People have seen initiatives come and go. They have learned that speaking up is risky, or pointless, or both. So they comply. They attend. They nod. And improvement quietly stalls.

A workshop like that often produces artifacts (a deck, an A3, a list of actions) but not ownership. The work returns to normal the next day.

Leadership behaviors that unlock (or shut down) Kaizen

Olaf’s post points straight at leadership behavior as the lever. So what does that mean in practice?

Behaviors that kill improvement (even with great templates)

Here are a few leadership patterns I see that match Olaf’s warning:

Starting with answers instead of questions: "Here’s what we’re going to do."
Treating the workshop as a performance review: people protect themselves, not the process.
Rewarding heroics over systems: firefighting gets praise, prevention gets ignored.
Asking for numbers before understanding: teams optimize the metric, not the flow.
Defending old choices: "We tried that and it didn’t work" becomes a conversation stopper.

Behaviors that create engagement quickly

If you want the "walls covered with ideas" scene Olaf described, leaders need to make a few behaviors unmistakable:

Go to Gemba with curiosity: "Show me where the work gets stuck."
Make it safe to surface problems: treat issues as data, not as blame.
Ask cross-functional questions: "What does this step create for the next team?"
Share decision rights: clarify what the team can change without escalation.
Follow through visibly: remove barriers fast so people learn that speaking up leads to action.

"You cannot improve a process with folded arms."

That line is not about posture. It is about ownership.

Designing workshops that make engagement unavoidable

Olaf contrasted sitting-with-laptops versus standing-with-ideas. Workshop design can either invite engagement or enable disengagement.

Practical design choices (simple, but powerful)

Stand up by default. Sitting invites passive consumption. Standing invites participation.
Use paper and walls. Physical visuals create shared attention and reduce multitasking.
Make the work visible early. Map the process, show the actual demand, highlight the bottleneck.
Timebox "presentations" and maximize "making." If the group is mostly listening, you are not improving.
Rotate the marker. If one person holds the pen, one person owns the thinking.

Facilitation prompts that change the energy in minutes

Try questions that pull people out of function-first thinking:

"Where does the customer feel this problem?"
"What information do you wish you had at this step?"
"What is the smallest experiment we can run by Friday?"
"What would make this step impossible to do wrong?"

These questions move the room from opinion to observation, and from debate to experimentation.

The real Gemba test: are people courageous enough to act?

Olaf wrote that improvement happens when someone is courageous enough to say "This isn’t good enough" and take action. That courage is not a personality trait you can demand. It is an outcome of the environment leaders create.

If you want more courage, build more clarity and safety:

Clarity: What problem are we solving, for whom, and how will we measure success?
Safety: Will I be punished for naming a problem, or will I be supported to solve it?
Support: When we find a barrier outside our control, will leadership remove it quickly?

When those conditions are present, engagement shows up in the room long before the KPI moves. And as Olaf put it, "the room tells the truth long before the results do."

A quick note on why this post went viral (and what to learn from it)

Since Olaf’s post resonated widely, it is also a useful example of strong LinkedIn content. The idea is memorable because it is:

Fast: "30 seconds" is a compelling promise.
Visual: you can picture the two rooms immediately.
Contrarian (but grounded): tools are not the first place to look.
Actionable: go to Gemba, watch behavior, change the conditions.

That is a content strategy lesson as much as a continuous improvement lesson: clear contrasts and concrete scenes spread because they are easy to understand and easy to retell.

What I would do next if I walked into the "folded arms" room

If you recognize the left-side scene in your own workshops, here is a practical reset:

Pause the agenda and restate purpose in plain language: "We are here to make this process easier, safer, and faster for the people doing it and the customers receiving it."
Change the format: close laptops, stand up, move to a wall, start mapping the actual work.
Create cross-functional pairs: have people interview each other about handoffs and pain points.
Ask for one uncomfortable truth: "What are we pretending not to see?" ثم keep it non-punitive.
Commit to one 48-hour experiment with a named owner and leader support.

You do not need a new template to do any of that. You need leadership behavior that signals: participation is expected, problems are welcome, and action will follow.

This blog post expands on a viral LinkedIn post by Olaf Boettger, Continuous Improvement & Executive Coaching. I partner with executives to build improvement cultures that grow people and deliver results.. View the original LinkedIn post →