The Three Reasons CI Programmes Actually Fail
Strip away the methodology debate and CI programmes die for three reasons. The same three, across every industry I have worked in — light source manufacturing, retail banking, private banking, upstream oil and gas, drilling operations, HVAC services, back office, HR.
Reason one — leadership behaviour
The number one predictor of CI failure is the gap between what leaders demand from teams and what leaders are willing to do themselves.
I watched a European manufacturer invest €2M in Black Belt certifications over four years. Thirty certified Black Belts. Zero measurable improvement in the operation.
The reason was not the training. The training was excellent. The reason was that while the Black Belts were learning A3 problem solving, their CEO was still holding three-hour operations reviews with a projector every Monday morning.
Every Black Belt in that room understood the message: improvement is something THEY do, not something WE do.
The CI programmes I have seen succeed — at Royal Mail, at NAGE, at Shell Malaysia — all share one trait. The senior leaders changed their behaviour first. They shifted their own meetings. They walked the Gemba personally. They wrote Kaizen cards. They stopped using production reviews to assign blame.
Your team will mirror what you actually do. Not what you ask them to do.
Reason two — absence of cadence
“We did Kaizen last year.”
If you have said this, you did not do Kaizen. You did a workshop.
Kaizen — same as Lean, same as Scrum — is a cadence, not an event. The point is not the improvement. The point is the discipline of repeatedly identifying and acting on improvements.
The cadence that dies first is always the same. Weekly improvement review. Someone has a crisis. The review gets cancelled. The team gets the message that the cadence is optional. Within three months, the cadence is dead.
At Shell Malaysia between 2016 and 2020, the leadership team never cancelled the weekly cadence. Not during COVID, not during oil price volatility, not during turnarounds. Four consecutive years of unbroken discipline. That is what earned the Malaysian Ministry of International Trade and Industry Gold Certification — the first for oil and gas in the country. That is what made Masaaki Imai award it Best CI Deployment in Malaysia at the Kaizen International Convention in Putrajaya 2018.
No better template. No cleverer framework. Just a cadence that never stopped.
Reason three — tool obsession
Every failed CI programme I have diagnosed spent too much time on the tools and not enough on the thinking.
“We need the right A3 template before we start.” “We need to choose between Scrum and Kanban.” “We need to standardise on a value stream mapping tool.”
None of this matters in the first 90 days.
What matters is that someone with authority is paying attention to the right thing every week, and that the team has permission to act on what they find. A whiteboard and the right question outperform any enterprise software in the opening phase. The software comes later, once the discipline is established.
The pattern, stripped down
Leaders who change their own behaviour. Cadence that survives crisis. Thinking before tooling. Everything else is detail.
If you recognise your own programme in any of these three, the fix is not more training. It is one honest conversation with the right people about what the last three months have actually looked like.
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For the full 1,800-word treatment of this topic — including the specific behaviours that separate the programmes that hold from the ones that die — see the upcoming Wednesday long-read: What 27 Years of CI Deployment Actually Taught Me, publishing Wednesday.
Jeroen van Koesveld — Master Black Belt, 27 years deploying CI across GE, Royal Mail, Credit Suisse, NAGE, Shell, KCA Deutag, Johnson Controls and Bentley Systems. Masaaki Imai Best CI Deployment Award, Putrajaya 2018 (Shell Malaysia — MITI Gold Certification).