Olaf Boettger recently shared something that caught my attention: "The biggest waste I removed wasn’t in the process. It was in my thinking." He followed it with a simple premise from 17 years in continuous improvement at Danaher: not clever frameworks or workshop templates, but corrections to his own assumptions.

That line lands because it flips where many leaders look for waste. We often search for it in the value stream map, the SOP, the dashboards, or the project list. Olaf is pointing somewhere less comfortable: the mental models leaders bring into every improvement conversation.

In this post, I want to expand on what Olaf is really saying and translate it into practical leadership behaviors you can use in your next Kaizen, daily management walk, or problem-solving session.

The most expensive waste is an untested assumption

Continuous improvement has a strange paradox: the technical side is learnable quickly, but the leadership side takes years.

Olaf wrote that workshops rarely fail because of effort. They fail because of leadership behavior. I have seen this too. Teams show up motivated, do the sticky notes, build the fishbone diagram, and produce action items. Then the real test begins:

Do leaders stay curious when the data turns red?
Do they protect time for stabilization?
Do they go see the work, or manage through slides?
Do they let the team own ideas, or do they "save" the room with their own solutions?

When those answers are off, improvement becomes theater. The tools are present, but the mindset is missing.

Five of Olaf Boettger’s lessons, expanded

Olaf listed 17 learnings and shared a few that are worth slowing down for. Here are five, with added context and examples.

1) Red is information, not failure

"Red is information, not failure."

A red metric is often treated like a personal verdict. When leaders react with blame, people learn fast: hide problems, sandbag forecasts, or redefine the metric.

If you want real continuous improvement, treat red as a signal to learn:

What changed in the process?
What is the gap telling us about our assumptions?
Is this common cause variation, or a special cause worth immediate containment?

A practical move: when a KPI turns red, start by saying, "Good. Now we know where to look." Then ask for a quick "what we know, what we do not know" summary before anyone proposes fixes.

2) You can have results or excuses, not both

"You can have results or excuses, not both."

This is not about being harsh. It is about choosing accountability over comfort.

Excuses are often socially acceptable versions of helplessness: "We are short-staffed," "Supply chain is the issue," "Corporate won’t approve it." Those might be true constraints, but they are not a plan.

The leadership shift is to separate explanation from ownership:

Yes, we have constraints.
Within those constraints, what will we change by when?
What support do you need from me to remove obstacles?

When you model that stance, you create a culture where people do not need perfect conditions to improve.

3) Stabilize before you improve. You cannot Kaizen chaos

"Stabilise before you improve. You cannot Kaizen chaos."

This is one of the most underrated lean lessons. Teams often jump into improvement events on top of a process that is not even running consistently.

If the basics are unstable, every "improvement" is just noise:

Work is not standardized.
Inputs vary wildly.
The schedule changes hourly.
Roles and handoffs are unclear.

Stabilization sounds boring, but it is the foundation. It can look like:

Defining the current best method and training to it
Establishing simple visual controls
Clarifying the rules for priority and escalation
Removing the most obvious sources of variation first

Only after stability do experiments mean something, because you can attribute changes in performance to changes in the process.

4) The truth rarely lives in the slide deck. It’s at Gemba

"The truth rarely lives in the slide deck. It's at Gemba."

Slides are summaries, and summaries are political. Even with great intent, a slide deck filters reality: it compresses time, removes friction, and turns messy work into clean rectangles.

Gemba restores the missing context:

You hear the interruptions that never show up in a report.
You see the workarounds people use to survive the day.
You notice waiting, searching, rework, and uncertainty.

If you want one immediate behavior change from Olaf’s post, it is this: replace one status meeting per week with a structured Gemba walk.

A simple structure:

Go see the process at the point of work
Ask operators what makes today hard
Check adherence to the standard (and why it breaks)
Leave with one agreed next step and an owner

5) The ideas were already there. Leadership wasn’t

"The ideas were already there. Leadership wasn’t."

This is both hopeful and challenging.

Hopeful because it means you do not need a genius to unlock improvement. The people closest to the work already carry the best insights.

Challenging because it redefines leadership. Your job is less "idea generator" and more "system designer":

Create psychological safety so problems get surfaced early
Build routines where ideas are captured, tested, and adopted
Provide clarity on what good looks like and what constraints matter
Remove barriers teams cannot remove alone

In other words, leadership is not charisma. It is the daily behavior that makes improvement inevitable.

Tools are easy. Changing how you think is not

Olaf admitted his own mindset shifts, and this is where the post becomes a leadership mirror:

Letting go of the need to look competent
Resisting the urge to jump to solutions
Walking to Gemba instead of hiding behind numbers

If you lead improvements, you have probably felt these tensions.

The competence trap

Many leaders were promoted for being the person with answers. Continuous improvement demands the opposite at times: being the person who asks better questions.

A small practice: in problem-solving meetings, speak last. Let the team frame the problem, share evidence, and suggest hypotheses. Your role is to sharpen thinking, not to dominate it.

The solution reflex

Jumping to solutions feels productive, but it often skips the core work: understanding cause-and-effect.

Replace "Here’s what we should do" with:

"What problem are we solving, exactly?"
"What evidence do we have?"
"What would we expect to see if that cause is true?"
"What is the smallest test we can run this week?"

The numbers shield

Metrics matter, but they can become armor. The spreadsheet says performance is down, but it cannot tell you what the operator experienced at 10:17 a.m. when the line stopped.

Gemba is where humility becomes operational.

Continuous improvement rewards those willing to be wrong in public

Olaf closed with a line that should be printed on every CI leader’s notebook: continuous improvement rewards those willing to be wrong in public.

That is a cultural standard, not a motivational quote.

Being wrong in public can look like:

Admitting you misread the situation
Changing your mind based on new evidence
Asking the team to challenge your assumption
Treating a failed experiment as a valuable result

This is how you remove the hidden waste in thinking. Not by reading another lean book, but by changing what you reward, what you tolerate, and what you model when the room gets uncomfortable.

A practical takeaway for your next improvement effort

If you are leading a workshop, Kaizen, or daily management routine this month, try these three prompts:

"Where might red be telling us something useful?"
"What must we stabilize before we optimize?"
"What do we need to see at Gemba that the deck cannot show?"

Those questions turn Olaf’s insight into action: the biggest waste is often not in the process map. It is in the leader’s default settings.

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 →