A Kaizen Week Chronicle #4: Midweek Pitch-Out – We Empower You (Until You Speak)

Notes from the Lean Frontlines

By Mr. Reginald Blunder, LSSBB, PMPLean Six Sigma Black Belt and Midweek Morale Collapse Coordinator

Dear Mr Misguider,

It’s Wednesday of Kaizen Week, the day when our hardworking frontline teams—empowered, inspired, and running entirely on expired granola bars and caffeine gum—presented their proposals to management.

The atmosphere was electric. Mostly from the flickering fluorescent lights in the conference room, but also from the raw enthusiasm in the air. We’d spent the first two days mapping value streams, identifying waste, and daring to believe that maybe—just maybe—our ideas might lead to real change.

And then management arrived.

Reluctantly.

Some had clearly been tricked into attending. One executive asked if this was the “lunch and learn,” and when informed it was a process improvement meeting, audibly sighed and asked if lunch was still involved.

The Presentations

Each team presented their improvements with nervous pride:

• Packaging proposed a relocation of supply bins to reduce motion waste. Management: “But have you factored in the long-term ergonomic impact of bending? Let’s commission a three-week study before moving anything.”

  
  

• Maintenance suggested digitizing the PM schedule using a shared spreadsheet. Management: “Hmm. How about we pilot a blockchain-based asset ledger with AI fault prediction instead? I read about it on LinkedIn.”

  
  

• Quality pitched a visual checklist system. Management: “Couldn’t we just tell people to try harder?”

  
  

• Shipping wanted to stop printing the same report in triplicate and mailing it to themselves. Management: “But that’s how it’s always been done.”

The phrase “We empower our employees” was repeated no fewer than six times—usually right before dismissing their ideas with a suggestion like, “What if we used VR headsets to simulate Kaizen instead?”

The Management Behavior Scorecard™

Management Behavior	Frequency	Impact
Saying “empower” while disempowering	7x	Demoralizing but on-brand
Demanding data that doesn’t exist	4x	Paralyzing
Introducing their own pet project	3x	Unrelated but very disruptive
Ignoring the root cause analysis entirely	5x	Impressive, in a way
Referring to Lean as “that belt thing”	2x	Spiritually exhausting

Highlights from the Pitch-Out Q&A:

• “Have you run this through Finance?”

  No, because Finance is on vacation and their out-of-office reply is a quote from Gladiator.

• “Did you align this with the corporate strategic initiative?”

  What is the corporate initiative? We’ve had four in three quarters. Currently, it’s something about “fluidity-focused acceleration.”

• “How does this improvement support my personal bonus metric?”

  Unclear. We were told this was about the process, not Jeff’s quarterly KPIs.

• “Let’s circle back once you’ve done a 9-box matrix to evaluate stakeholder alignment across value strata.”

  ...What?

  
  

The Pet Project Insertion

And then it happened—the inevitable moment when management pitched their own solution.

This time, it was an “augmented reality Gemba initiative” involving QR codes taped to equipment that, when scanned, would show a hologram of the process steps… which, unfortunately, still haven’t been defined.

When someone asked if this project had gone through any Lean analysis, the response was:

“Well, we assume it’s Lean. It uses technology.”

The team tried gently explaining that their simpler, cheaper, employee-generated solution might be more effective. Management responded by nodding solemnly and replying:

“We empower our people to speak… but we must stay aligned with innovation.”

The phrase “This is above your pay grade” was said, not once, but thrice, including to someone who volunteered to be here on their day off.

Final Thoughts from the Trenches

We survived Pitch-Out. Barely. Spirits are bruised. Coffee is gone. And we’ve been asked to “circle back with a revised strategy deck”—which means take your idea, dress it in enough jargon, and hope it sounds expensive enough to approve.

Still, hope remains. The teams are regrouping. We’ve printed new A3s. We’ve laminated the old ones (because nothing says “please approve this” like lamination). And tomorrow, we execute.

Or at least we pretend to, until someone from Marketing asks why we can’t make the pills in colors that “match the season.”

Yours in Dysfunctional Empowerment,

Mr. Blunder

Lean Six Sigma Black Belt

“Bringing Clarity to Chaos, Except During Executive Presentations”