Laura Kempf's latest project gave her insight to the most important tool lean practitioners have, which is “bringing people together”. Lean events do that very well and in a company where people have come together from various backgrounds, experiences, acquired companies and so forth, just agreeing on how to work together is a huge improvement in itself.

The Leaning Edge Consortium recently launched at program at the WH level focused around improving the way we work together across Watson Health. I remember when lean first came to our company and executives would ponder why it took a lean event to get employees to think of the improvement. The truth of it is that the lean event allows the team to take a step back, analyze the issue and make the improvement. Our greatest tool as facilitators is bridging the gap in allowing employees to work together.

In this segment of A Leaning Edge Debra interviews Laura Kempf, IBM Watson Health Business Transformation Consultant to talk about Lean practices.