Powering Gemba Walks with Artificial Intelligence | Follow for posts on Continuous Improvement and Innovation

Hi - I'm Ivan, an industrial engineer with 7+ years of experience in Operations Management and Kaizen.

I serve two main groups of people:

1. Executives tired of broken processes burning money - I show them how to fix it and recapture 15-30% in Muda

2. Founders in Continuous Improvement who know their stuff but can't crack LinkedIn - I show them how to turn it into a legit revenue channel

(send me a direct message for more info)

I started writing on LinkedIn in October 2023. Since then, I have been sharing actionable, educational, and entertaining content to support LinkedIn community members in their Kaizen journey. It helped me grow my audience from 9,000 to 100,000 followers in 2024.

I have been posting around:

	• Continuous Improvement
	• Lean Manufacturing
	• Growth Mindset
	• Innovation

Including insights on 5S, Value Stream Mapping, Leadership, Industry 4.0, and Problem Solving. 

Now I'm building Gemba Walk AI to make every Gemba Walk part of a learning system, where collective insights drive faster, better decisions than any single expert could achieve.

For free weekly tips, subscribe to The Kaizen Geek newsletter.

Ivan Carillo

Toyota's competitors thought Taiichi Ohno was insane. He was letting line workers stop production over a scratched fender. They stopped laughing when Toyota dominated the industry for the next 50 years. Here's what happened:

After World War II, Ohno visited auto factories in Detroit. He expected to learn from the best. Instead, he found rework areas filled with broken pieces and leftover parts. Waste everywhere, hiding in plain sight.

He went back to Toyota City and did something nobody had tried before. At every station on the assembly line, he hung a rope called the Andon cord.

The instruction was simple: 

If you see a defect pull the cord. The line slows or stops. Engineers, workers, and suppliers huddle up and fix it on the spot. Detroit thought he was crazy. "How can you build thousands of cars a day if you stop the line for every little scratch?"

Ohno's answer was simple: 

A scratched fender is an early warning that a piece of equipment is failing. Fix the scratch today, and you prevent 500 defective fenders next week. Ignore it, and you're building rework areas just like Detroit.

That's the difference between firefighting and fire prevention.

Most operations leaders I talk to are stuck in firefighting mode. They walk past small defects every day because the line has to keep moving.

But those small defects are talking to you. They're telling you exactly where your next big quality failure will come from.

How many "minor" defects is your team walking past today that are actually early warning signs?

Kaizen vs. Innovation
 
Who wins?
 
There are two types of improvement:
 
Kaizen → Continuous improvements through ongoing effort. Involves everyone. Requires little money but sustained work.
 
Innovation → Dramatic improvements from large investments in new technology. Involves select champions. Requires big money but less sustained effort.
 
You need both. But here's how to proceed if you are forced to choose between the two.
 
 Choose Innovation when:
 
-you need dramatic breakthroughs to compete
-technology has fundamentally changed
-current processes are broken beyond repair
-you're entering new markets
-you must leapfrog competitors
 
Choose Kaizen when:
 
-you need sustainable competitive advantage
-you want to build organizational capability
-current processes work but need improvement
-you want everyone engaged in improvement
-you need to protect gains from innovation
 
Innovation creates the breakthrough.
Kaizen sustains it.
 
Without continuous improvement, every innovation you invest in will slowly erode back to zero.

A split illustration comparing Kaizen and Innovation. On the left, a hand-drawn sketch of a SIM card tray with a notched SIM card — labeled "Poka Yoke" — representing Kaizen's approach of error-proofing and incremental improvement. On the right, four SIM card generations shown in descending size order: Full Size, Mini SIM, Nano SIM, and eSIM — representing Innovation's leaps to entirely new solutions. Below both panels, the caption reads: "Kaizen gets you better, Innovation gets you different. You need both to thrive."

Taiichi Ohno said: "Where there is no standard, there can be no Kaizen."
 
He could have kept going:
 
 
Where there is no Kaizen, there can be no Innovation.
 
Standards don't kill creativity.
They create the foundation that makes creativity possible.

A pencil-drawn diagram of a steep incline with a ball marked "P" (representing a Process) at four progressive positions moving uphill. Each upward leap is labeled "kaizen" with a curved arrow. Between each position, a wedge or chock block under the ball — labeled "Standardization!" — prevents it from sliding back down. At the bottom left, a ball with no wedge shows the process rolling backward, labeled "process," illustrating regression without standardization. Below the illustration, the caption reads: "Where there is no standard, there can be no Kaizen."

"We don't have time for improvement."
This is the biggest lie in business.
You have time for:
 
-fixing the same problems every week
-working around broken processes
-apologizing to angry customers
-replacing burned-out employees
-losing market share to competitors
 
But not 30 mins a day to move forward?
 
Organizations that say they can't afford Kaizen are already spending a third of their time on the consequences of not improving.
 
They're paying the price. Just not getting the benefits.
 
Real Kaizen can fit inside the workday you already have:
 
→ 3-minute fixes at the point of work
→ 15-minute daily stand-ups
→ 1-hour weekly problem-solving sessions
→ Half-day monthly deep dives
 
Inaction is the real time waster.

Most companies are stuck on one speed. That's why they never reach Operational Excellence. The Japanese solved this decades ago with 3 concepts most leaders still confuse:
 
Kaizen - Kaikaku - Kakushin
 
Most leaders treat them as buzzwords. A few use one of them well. Very few uses all three in the right way, at the right time.
 
Here's what they mean (and why you need all three):
 
1/ Kaizen → Change for the better
 
Small, continuous improvements. Every day. Everyone involved.
 
→ Low cost, low risk
→ Driven by frontline workers and managers alike
→ Builds lasting habits, not one-time fixes
 
Example: Adjusting a workstation layout to cut motion by 10%.
 
Kaizen doesn't create breakthroughs.
It sustains them, and compounds gains over time.
 
2/ Kaikaku → Radical change
 
A deliberate, large-scale transformation of a process or system.
 
→ Top-down decision driven by urgency or opportunity
→ Higher investment and risk
→ Rewires how an entire system operates
 
Example: Redesigning your entire production flow to implement pull-based manufacturing.
 
Kaikaku creates a new baseline.
Kaizen then locks it in.
 
3/ Kakushin → Innovation
 
Reinvention. Creating something that didn't exist before.
 
→ Highest risk, highest potential reward
→ Disrupts markets or creates entirely new ones
→ Requires courage to abandon what's working
 
Example: Building an AI-powered process that makes the old one obsolete.
 
Kakushin opens new territory.
The other two make sure you can hold it.

Hand-drawn graph on aged paper showing three levels of process improvement over time: Kaizen as small incremental steps, Kaikaku as a steeper staircase of radical change, and Kakushin as an exponential curve representing innovation and reinvention.

Accountability and blame cannot coexist.
 
Pick one.
 
The most common tendency in traditional management?
 
Falling into the blame trap.
 
Blame Culture
 
→ Problems hide
→ Mistakes get covered up
→ People protect themselves
→ Learning stops
→ Improvement dies
 
Accountability Culture
 
→ Problems surface quickly
→ Mistakes become lessons
→ People own their commitments
→ Learning accelerates
→ Improvement thrives

Blame asks: "Who caused this?"
Accountability asks: "What caused this?"

All the difference in one word.

Hand-written text on a beige paper background reading "Blame the people" with "the people" crossed out in red, replaced below with "the process" written in red — transforming the phrase into "Blame the process."

Visual Management changes how people think, not just what they see. (here's what most leaders miss about ↓)
 
Kaizen is 90% Mindset, 10% Tools.
 
But what is the most powerful tool in your toolbox?
 
Well, your eyes.

We humans are visual creatures - our eyes take in information very quickly.

Visual Management is used to 

+share information 
+set new work standards 
+provide workflow transparency 

Key Steps: 

1/ Make information visible and accessible 
2/ Create visual cues that can be understood quickly 
3/ Highlight abnormal conditions that need attention 
4/ Enable teams to see project status and progress 

Some Examples: 

+Dashboards that display KPIs 
+Kanban Cards to limit work-in-progress 
+Gantt Charts to illustrate project timelines 
+Andon Systems that signal problems 
+Color-Coding systems for quick identification 

Another example is in this photo!

Remember: 

Humans process visual information much faster than text.

A clean indoor parking garage with three yellow-lined parking spaces on a polished concrete floor. A red Tesla Model 3 occupies the left space, a silver Ford F-150 truck occupies the right space, and the middle space is empty — visually demonstrating visual management through floor marking that makes normal (occupied) and abnormal (empty) conditions immediately obvious at a glance.

21 sentences every kaizen leader must hear at least once (read my fav ones below ↓)


When I read books, especially about Kaizen, I always look for something that will stay with me. I end up writing down the things that strike me most in my journal. Here are the 4 sentences in the list that I believe are most powerful (and why):

1/ Gemba never lies

I've seen leaders make terrible decisions because they trusted Excel sheets over their own eyes. The problems that cost us millions are often visible on the shopfloor, but nobody bother to look. Reports tell you what people want you to know. Gemba tells you what's actually happening. I think the moment you stop walking the floor is the moment you lose touch with reality. Your operators won't lie to you if you show up regularly, ask good questions, and actually listen to their answers.

2/ Without psychological safety, Kaizen dies.

I've watched brilliant Kaizen programs collapse because people were terrified to speak up. Companies that blame individuals for systemic problems get exactly what they deserve. Silence. Workers hide defects, skip reporting near-misses, and watch waste happen rather than risk looking stupid or getting punished. I think this is why most Kaizen initiatives fail within a year. You can't improve what people won't talk about, and people won't talk about problems in a culture of fear.

3/ People who do the work are the experts

I learned this the hard way early in my career when I implemented a Kaizen idea. The operators supported it, then immediately went back to their old method the moment I left. Every time I've ignored frontline expertise, I've wasted time and money solving the wrong problem. I think we underestimate how much knowledge lives in the hands and muscle memory of people who do the same task hundreds of times daily.

4/ Kaizen culture doesn't support strategy. Kaizen culture is strategy.

I spent years thinking CI was something that helped execute our "real" strategy. I was wrong. Companies with a strong Kaizen culture adapt faster, survive disruptions better, and outperform competitors with superior strategic plans. I think this is the principle most executives miss. Your competitors can copy your products in months, but they can't copy a culture where thousands of people solve problems every single day.

P.S. What's your fav one in the list? Anything else to add here?

21 Sentences Every Kaizen Leader Must Hear At Least Once — A numbered list of Kaizen leadership principles on a textured beige background, including: Gemba never lies; Challenge the status quo, always; Everyone must own improvement; Problems are treasures, not threats; Plan, Do, Check, Act—repeat forever; Data tells you what, people tell you why; Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication; People who do the work ARE the experts; Speed and quality are not opposing forces; Without psychological safety, Kaizen dies; Expertise isn't about having all the answers; Standardization comes BEFORE improvement; Leaders must resist the urge to jump to solutions; Kaizen doesn't support strategy, Kaizen IS strategy; If the student hasn't learned, the teacher hasn't taught; The master knows when to step aside and let others grow; KPIs can improve even as the culture declines, watch both; Creating a Kaizen culture cannot be separated from sustaining it; and others.

Master Continuous Improvement to keep your business ahead in 2026. 

(check this out ↓)

1/ PDCA

PDCA is the backbone of Lean problem-solving.

Four steps. Methodical. Repeatable.

Use it for:

+Problem solving
+Quality management
+New product development
+Process improvement

It stops you from jumping to solutions before you understand the problem.

2/ Value Stream Mapping

VSM shows every step in your operation from raw material to customer delivery. It exposes waste hiding in plain sight.

Five steps to build one:

+Pick a product family
+Assemble the VSM team
+Calculate customer demand
+Map the material flow
+Map the information flow

3/ Kanban

Toyota invented Kanban in the 1950s to control production flow.

Today it manages work across manufacturing, logistics, and software.

A Kanban board has three elements: columns, cards, and swimlanes. 

Move work faster, cut waste, and see bottlenecks before they cost you.

4/ 5S

5S turns a chaotic workspace into a clean, standardized one.
Five steps, all starting with S:
Sort (Seiri) — Remove what you don't need
Set In Order (Seiton) — A place for everything
Shine (Seiso) — Clean and inspect daily
Standardize (Seiketsu) — Lock in the new normal
Sustain (Shitsuke) — Make it a habit

5/ Poka Yoke

Poka-Yoke means "mistake-proofing" in Japanese.

It builds error prevention directly into the process, so operators can't make the wrong move even if they try.

6/ Gemba Walk

Data tells you what happened. Gemba shows you why.

"Gemba" means "actual place" in Japanese.

Leave your desk. Walk the floor. See the work firsthand.

***
Manufacturing teams struggle to capture critical floor insights. 

That's why we are building gembawalk.ai. 

Gemba Walk AI digitalizes your observation process, so you can ensure your CI efforts deliver measurable results. 

Join the waitlist now: gembawalk.ai 

(and get also our checklists for free)

Fast, Cheap, Good - Pick two.
 
(trade-offs are inevitable)
 
"We need it fast, under budget, and perfect."
 
Everyone knows it's impossible. Nobody says it.
 
Three months later:
 
The project is late, over budget, or broken.
 
 You can't have everything.
 
The worst project managers?
 
They promise all three.
Then they blame the team when it doesn't work.
 
PS. Do you think the project management triangle is still relevant?

Before you launch your next improvement initiative, ask yourself one question:
 
Have I stabilized the current process first?
 
Improvement efforts layered on top of unstable processes produce unstable results.
 
The gains look real for a few time, then quietly disappear.
 
Standardize. Document. Train. Hold the standard.
 
Then improve.

Hand-drawn diagram showing three targets representing process states. Top-left: an 'Unstable Process' target with dots scattered across all rings. A solid arrow labeled 'What most teams try' points directly to the top-right 'Stabilized Process' target, where dots are clustered near the center but still spread out. A dashed arrow with an X crosses out this direct path. Instead, a second path goes downward to a 'Stabilized + Improved' target at the bottom, where all dots are tightly grouped in the bullseye, then curves up to the Stabilized Process — labeled 'What actually works.' The message: don't try to improve an unstable process directly — first stabilize it, then improve.

Stop calling them solutions. They are countermeasures. Here's why it changes how you think: (not a wordplay at all)
 
 
"Solution" means the problem is solved.
 
Done.
Move on.
Forget about it.
 
"Countermeasure" means you countered today's conditions.
 
Tomorrow brings new ones.
Stay sharp.
 
Watch what happens when teams use each word:
 
SOLUTION MINDSET
 
→ Fix it once
→ Walk away
→ Blame someone when it breaks again
→ Resist going back to look
 
COUNTERMEASURE MINDSET
 
→ Counter what you see now
→ Watch how it holds
→ Expect things to shift
→ Plan your next adjustment
 
One word builds complacency. The other builds discipline.

A pencil sketch-style portrait of Taiichi Ohno, the father of the Toyota Production System, depicted as a middle-aged Japanese man in a collared shirt and tie, with a factory floor illustrated in the background. Beside his portrait is a quote that reads: "Something is wrong if workers do not look around each day, find things that are tedious or boring, and then rewrite the procedures. Even last month's manual should be out of date." — Taiichi Ohno.

Let's be honest. Your endless meetings are a waste of time. Here's how Kaizen organizations turn 10 minutes into millions of dollars in savings:
 
Traditional meetings:
 
→ 30-60 minutes of opinions
→ Problems hidden in PowerPoints
→ Action items that die in email
→ Same issues next week
 
Daily huddles:
 
→ 10 minutes standing up
→ Problems visible on boards
→ Ownership assigned immediately
→ Issues escalate or resolve in 24 hours
 
We implemented this at a 300-person manufacturing facility.
 
Week 1: "We don't have time for daily meetings"
Week 4: "How did we survive without this?"
 
Here's the structure that made a difference:
 
Tier 1 → Frontline - Daily
 
+What broke?
+Who needs help?
+What's blocking us?
 
Tier 2 → Supervisors - Daily
 
+What can't frontline solve?
+Where do we need support?
 
Tier 3 → Managers - 2x week
 
+What patterns are emerging?
+What resources needed?
 
Tier 4 → Leaders - Weekly
 
+What strategic issues surfaced?
+What investments required?
 
Results after 90 days:
 
Problems solved → 73% faster
Employee engagement → +34%
Productivity → +22%
 
P.S. Your teams don't need longer meetings.
 
They need better systems.

A pencil sketch illustration of five businessmen in suits sitting around a conference table, reacting in shock and alarm as a dark, tentacled monster emerges from a swirling vortex at the center of the table. Money bills float through the air. Financial charts and graphs — showing upward trends, bar charts, and pie charts — cover the whiteboards on the surrounding walls. The creature has multiple eyes and dripping tentacles, cracking through the table's surface, symbolizing a hidden threat consuming organizational resources or time during a business meeting.

The operator put all his setup tools on a cart instead of walking back and forth. 

Setup time down 15%. 

No engineers. No capital. No approval process.

That's Kaizen.

A pencil-sketch illustration of a maintenance worker in work clothes and a beanie hat standing in an industrial workshop. To his left, a rolling tool cart sits in front of a pegboard wall displaying organized hand tools including wrenches, screwdrivers, pliers, and gauges. A toolbox rests on the floor beside the cart. To his right, a large metal lathe machine occupies the background. The setting evokes a factory floor with exposed brick walls and overhead pipes.

Management has 2 functions: maintenance and improvement. The higher you go in management, the more time you spend on improvement. (read this ↓)
 
There are two types of improvement:
 
Kaizen → Continuous improvements through ongoing effort. Involves everyone. Requires little money but sustained work.
 
Innovation → Dramatic improvements from large investments in new technology. Involves select champions. Requires big money but less sustained effort.
 
But there's one thing most managers misunderstand:
 
Kaizen creates something innovation alone cannot, 
i.e. lasting change that compounds over time.
 
Innovation alone:
 
- Big improvement spike
- Gradual decline as gains erode
- New problems emerge
- Process isn't maintained
- Another innovation creates another spike
- Another decline follows
 
Kaizen plus innovation:
 
- Innovation creates the breakthrough
- Kaizen sustains and enhances the gains
- Next innovation starts from a higher baseline
- Creates a staircase pattern upward
- Competitors can't catch up
 
You need both.
 
Innovation creates the breakthrough.
Kaizen sustains it.
 
Without CI, every innovation you invest in will slowly erode back to zero.

Traditional management follows Plan-Do-Check-Finish. After checking results, they stop. Here is why their improvements don't last:
 
Companies preach the use of PDCA, but they are used to skip the Act phase.
 
No standardization. No next cycle. Improvement quietly dies.
 
Sound familiar?
 
1/ Team builds a detailed improvement plan
2/ Implementation starts with real enthusiasm 
3/ Results get measured once, maybe twice
4/ The new process gets abandoned when the next crisis hits
 
Real PDCA never stops spinning:
 
Plan → Set the target and action steps
Do → Run the pilot on a small scale first
Check → Measure results against expectations
Act → Standardize what works, kill what doesn't
 
In a Kaizen culture, every completed cycle starts the next one.
 
That's how small gains compound into advantages your competitors can't copy.

A site operations lead fixed a morale crisis in 45 days. His total investment: 3 minutes per day. Zero dollars. Here's the story:
 
 
A manufacturing plant had a turnover problem nobody could explain. The plant manager brought in an HR consultant to interview employees at every level.
 
The complaints weren't what he expected.
 
→ "When I walk past the site lead, he doesn't look me in the eye."
→ "I've never seen him smile."
→ "I sacrificed time with my children for that task. Not a single thank you."
→ "I was presenting to leadership. Every one of them was texting."
 
No one asked for more money.
 
They wanted to be seen. They wanted to know their work mattered.
 
The fix took no budget, no program rollout.
 
 The plant manager committed to 3 minutes a day:
 
→ Greeting people by name on the floor
→ Asking one person about their weekend
→ Saying "thank you" when someone delivered work
→ Putting his phone away in meetings
 
3 minutes of respect and consideration each day.
 
That's it.
 
45 days later, morale scores had jumped. Attrition slowed. The floor felt different.
 
People don't leave bad companies. They leave leaders who make them feel invisible.
 
PS. When was the last time you walked the floor and thanked someone by name?

Do you know what the clearest expression of leadership contradiction is? Executives who say they want a Continuous Improvement culture, but then punish people who report problems. (read this ↓) 
 
Some executives say they want to build a Kaizen culture.
Then they punish people for surfacing problems.
 
Let me be clear about this:
 
You can't build a Kaizen culture in the dark.
 
Kaizen organizations understand that
problems aren't threats. They're treasures.
 
You should strive for true transparency.
 
It means:
 
→ Making problems intentionally visible
→ Celebrating when problems are surfaced
→ Creating systems where hiding issues is harder than solving them
 
Remember:
 
Secrecy is the enemy of excellence.
 
P.S. How visible are problems in your organization?
 
Can people surface issues without fear?

Hand-drawn sketch of an iceberg. The visible tip above water is labeled "What executives see." The massive submerged portion is filled with operational problems: waste, delays, defects, conflict, rework, inefficiency, miscommunication, technical debt, bottlenecks, poor planning, manual work, overproduction, inventory, transportation, motion, waiting, non-value-add, quality issues, misalignment, burnout, bugs, broken processes, silos, lack of transparency, poor alignment, cultural friction, bureaucracy, duplication of effort, hidden costs, missed deadlines, and systemic flaws.

The biggest lie in manufacturing improvement:
 
"Kaizen only works in Japan."
 
Companies in the US, Europe, and beyond have proven the opposite for decades.
 
Culture affects how you implement Kaizen, not whether it works.
 
The principles are universal because they're just good management:
 
+observe the process 
+involve the people closest to the work
+make small improvements every day
 
…and never stop.
 
That's Kaizen.

***
Manufacturing teams struggle to capture critical floor insights. 

That's why we are building gembawalk.ai. 

Gemba Walk AI digitalizes your observation process, so you can ensure your CI efforts deliver measurable results. 

Join the waitlist now: gembawalk.ai

We are launching in April for a limited time before we waitlist again.

A minimalist Japanese-style illustration featuring a large red circle (evoking the rising sun) against a cream, textured background. In the foreground, black silhouettes depict a traditional arched bridge with a figure standing on it, a pagoda-style structure with a person nearby, and a windswept bonsai tree to the right. Two cranes fly across the upper portion of the red circle. The overall aesthetic evokes vintage Japanese poster art.

I have been posting here about Kaizen since October 2023. Translated in numbers that's 971 posts and 100M+ impressions only from this profile. I did it mainly because I love talking about it, and here is my take on Kaizen:
 
 
Kaizen means more than Continuous Improvement. 
  
Kai means "change, remove the old with new." Zen means "good." Not good as in "effective," but good as in the moral sense of being right. The opposite of Zen is not just bad; it's Evil.
  
This matters for how you lead improvement. I've seen too many initiatives that made the numbers better but people's lives worse. These were not in line with the true meaning of Zen.

We often forget that improvement should make our people more capable, businesses should have positive impact, and change should increase human potential.

Making nothing but money isn't great business. And driving change is not as effective if you don't live by Kaizen.

 Here are 5 things to help you build a true Kaizen mindset in 2026:
 
1/ Own problems you didn't create
 
Most people see a problem and think "Not my job" or "I didn't break it." 
 
Stop waiting for someone else to fix what's broken. Someone before me said it better: "Just because something's not your fault doesn't mean it's not your responsibility." 
 
When you see waste, it's yours to address. You don't fix everything yourself. But you stop walking past problems like they're invisible.
 
2/ Question everything you do more than once
 
If you've done the same task twice the same way, ask yourself: "Could this be better?"
 
When you catch yourself saying "That's just how we do it," you've stopped thinking. The moment something becomes routine is when you should examine it.
 
3/ Get curious about failure
 
When something goes wrong, do you look for who to blame or what to learn?
 
Train yourself to ask "Why did this happen?" before "Whose fault is this?" Treat every defect, delay, and complaint as data. See failure as feedback, not someone's mistake to punish.
 
4/ Think in experiments, not solutions
 
Kaizen practitioners are comfortable being wrong because being wrong teaches you something.
 
Start saying "Let's try this and see what happens." Wrong turns teach you where the dead ends are. Run small tests. Fail fast. Learn faster. 
 
5/ Listen to the people doing the work
 
The operator who runs the machine every day knows more about it than you do. Believe this. Ask their opinion before you share yours. Listen to understand, not to respond. Frontline knowledge beats management theories.
 
***
P.S. Kaizen feels overwhelming when you don't know where to start or what to focus on.
 
I created The Kaizen Geek, my newsletter delivering bite-sized, actionable improvement strategies every week. 
 
Join now: ivancarillo.com

Founder of MTD Training & Skillshub | Trusted by 9,000+ Companies to Build Leaders & Drive Sales | Award-Winning L&D Partner | Author & Speaker

After more than 20 years building businesses in learning and performance, one thing is clear: training only matters if it makes an impact.

I’ve seen too much learning that looks good on paper but disappears once normal work resumes. Courses get completed. Boxes get ticked. Very little changes.

I’m the Founder and CEO of MTD Training and Skillshub. Together, we help organisations improve performance through stronger leadership, management and sales capability, supported by a practical learning ecosystem designed to be applied, not just consumed.

Over the years, my teams and I have worked with more than 9,000 organisations. That scale gives you perspective. You start to see what sticks, what fades, and why most training fails to deliver lasting impact.

The biggest issue I see is focus. Too much training is built around activity rather than outcomes. Our approach is simple: impact over attendance. 

Everything we do is designed to shift behaviour, build habits and improve performance in the real world.

The results matter. One FTSE 250 organisation saw a 27% increase in leadership capability within three months. Another generated over £1.5m in additional sales within six months of a programme going live.

We work with multinationals, fast-growing teams and SMEs. The size varies, but the expectation doesn’t. They all want learning that delivers measurable change, not just good feedback scores.

Alongside leading the businesses, I’m also the author of several practical books on leadership, sales, performance and coaching, and I speak regularly at conferences, on podcasts and in the media. I focus on what works when things are busy, complex and under pressure.

Recognition includes industry awards for L&D and HR impact, and being named the UK’s #1 Sales Influencer in the Top 100 Sales Index.

This profile is where I share thinking from running and scaling learning businesses, and from seeing how performance really changes inside organisations.

Sean McPheat

Most meetings don’t move work forward.

They just consume time.

Agendas drift, discussions wander, decisions get delayed, and people leave feeling drained rather than focused. 

I bet this sounds familiar to you! (And yes, I’m guilty as charged too.)

Over time, meetings can become a habit instead of a tool.

I’ve sat through hundreds of them. The worst ones all have the same thing in common — nobody can tell you why the meeting actually exists.

That’s the starting point for this exercise.
It’s designed for learning professionals to use directly, share with their managers, or for managers to work through on their own. 

It works best when meetings regularly overrun, participation is low, or decisions aren’t followed through. New managers often get the most from it because it gives them a clear structure to lead with confidence.

Here’s the core of it.

Pick one meeting that clearly isn’t working. (Some that I used to attend were just moan fests!)

Step back and ask what it’s truly meant to achieve. Most managers have never actually defined that — they inherited the meeting and kept running it.

Once the purpose is clear, write down the desired outcomes so everyone knows what success looks like before the meeting starts.

Then look at the invite list. Fewer people almost always leads to better discussion and faster decisions. 

Clarify who’s deciding, who’s contributing, and who’s just there to stay informed. That one change alone removes a huge amount of frustration.

Build a simple structure with time limits for each section. Summarise decisions before the meeting ends. Confirm who’s responsible for what. And close with a quick “was this useful?” — not as a box-ticking exercise, but to break the habit of repeating the same format week after week because nobody questioned it.

For L&D teams, this exercise is gold dust. 

It surfaces facilitation gaps, planning issues, and team habits that drain productivity. Those insights feed straight into coaching conversations and future development work.
For managers, the impact is immediate. 

Meetings get shorter. Energy improves. Accountability goes up. And the meetings that didn’t need to exist? 

Gone. Off the calendar!

Great managers don’t run more meetings. They run better ones.

Please use this exercise any way you like.

------------------------

For more valuable content, follow me,
Sean McPheat and then hit the 🔔 button
to stay updated on my future posts.

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Founder & CEO, MTD Training & Skillshub | Leadership & Management Development | Trusted by L&D Leaders in 9,000+ Organisations

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Ivan Carillo's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreSean McPheat's LinkedIn Performance

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Performance ScoreIvan Carillo's LinkedIn Performance