The hidden tool tax — why new CI practitioners burn week one rebuilding templates
A field note for anyone joining a continuous improvement team in 2026.
Every continuous improvement programme I have audited in the last decade has the same first-week pattern. A new practitioner joins. The manager hands over a shared drive. The drive contains the templates the last person built, in a layout the new person would never use, in fonts and colours from a corporate identity that was retired three years ago. The new practitioner does what any reasonable person would do. They open a blank document and start rebuilding.
This is the hidden tool tax. And almost nobody talks about it.
What the tool tax actually costs
Here is the maths I run for clients who think their CI team is slow.
A single A3 problem-solving template, built from scratch in PowerPoint by a competent practitioner, takes roughly four to six hours. The first time. The second person who joins the team will spend the same four to six hours, because the first version is "not quite right for my project." So will the third, and the fourth.
Multiply by the standard six CI tools every new practitioner needs in their first ninety days — A3, SIPOC, fishbone with 5-Why, Pareto, value-stream sheet, project charter — and the bill is eighteen to thirty hours per new hire. In a mid-sized improvement team that hires three to five CI specialists a year, the annual cost of rebuilding tools nobody asked anyone to rebuild lands somewhere between one hundred and two hundred hours.
Two hundred hours is five working weeks. Five working weeks every year that the CI team is not improving processes, not running kaizens, not facilitating root-cause sessions. They are reformatting boxes on a piece of paper.
This is the tax the team does not realise it is paying.
Why it happens
Three reasons. None of them are anybody's fault.
The first is aesthetic. CI templates are facilitator tools. The person facilitating has to be confident in front of a room. Confidence comes partly from owning the tool you brought. A template built by someone three years ago, in their style, in their words, does not feel owned. So the new person rebuilds.
The second is practical. The legacy templates almost always have small but real flaws. A box labelled "current state" when the new person wants "current condition." A SIPOC laid out left to right when the new person was trained right to left. A fishbone with the standard 6M categories when the new person works in healthcare and needs Methods, Mother Nature, Manpower, Machines, Materials, Measurement plus Patient and Policy. The cost of fixing the legacy template is roughly the same as the cost of rebuilding it from scratch, so the new person rebuilds.
The third is organisational. CI teams are not measured on template reuse. They are measured on projects shipped, savings realised, employees trained. Time spent rebuilding tools is invisible in the dashboard. Senior leadership never sees it. Nobody pushes back. So the new person rebuilds.
Why senior leadership treats CI as slow
This is the part most CI leads do not see clearly.
When a new CI hire spends week one rebuilding templates, the visible output to the rest of the organisation is zero. No project started. No kaizen run. No problem solved. The new hire then spends week two and three doing onboarding work that does not look like CI. By week four the manager who hired them is being asked "what are they actually doing." By month two the rest of the organisation has formed a quiet view that CI is a slow function. By month six that view is permanent, regardless of what the new practitioner has shipped.
The hidden tool tax does not just cost hours. It costs the credibility of the function. The new practitioner is judged on the speed of their first visible win, and the first visible win is delayed by a working week because of formatting work nobody mandated.
Mature CI teams solve this in one of three ways.
What mature CI teams actually do
Option one. They have a templates library that nobody is allowed to "improve." It is not perfect. It is the standard. New hires use it. Strong opinions about layout are heard, logged, and addressed in a quarterly templates review. Until then, the library is the library. This works for big mature teams but is rare in practice because the discipline is hard.
Option two. They buy a third-party templates set and use that as the standard. The advantage is that the templates were never owned by anyone on the team, so there is no political fight over whose layout wins. The disadvantage is that most off-the-shelf CI templates are clip-art quality.
Option three. They give every new hire a budget — usually fifty to two hundred euros — and tell them "buy whatever templates you like, use them from day one, do not build them yourself." This is the option I see working most often in 2026. It treats the templates problem as a procurement problem, not a craft problem, and it lets the new practitioner spend week one on actual CI work.
What I built, and why
I built the Stormholt CI templates because I lost two months of my second CI role to the tax described above. The templates are deliberately small in number — twenty-five of them — and deliberately cheap. The free Lean CI Starter Pack covers A3, SIPOC, fishbone, and Pareto. The standalone single-template products sit at nine euros each. The full toolkit is thirty-nine.
None of the prices are accidents. The free pack exists so a new practitioner can start running improvement work in week one without asking for a budget. The nine-euro standalone exists so the decision to buy a tool is never a finance conversation. The thirty-nine-euro toolkit exists so a CI lead can give a new hire the whole library on day one for less than the cost of a working lunch.
The point of the catalogue is not to sell templates. The point is to take the tool problem off the table for new CI practitioners so they can spend week one on improvement.
If you have read this far and the tax described above sounds familiar, the free pack is at stormholt.org/products/lean-ci-starter-pack-free-download.
If you are a CI lead and your team is hiring, the toolkit at stormholt.org/products/ci-mastery-toolkit is built for that exact moment. Buy one copy, share with every new hire as part of onboarding, and you will have repaid the cost the first time a new hire skips the rebuild.
If you do nothing else after reading this note, do one thing — count how many hours of the last new CI hire's first month went into rebuilding templates somebody else had already built. The number will surprise you. Then decide whether you are going to keep paying that tax.
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Jeroen van Koesveld
Founder, Stormholt — stormholt.org