The Most Important Question

I was in a warehouse morning stand-up meeting years ago.

Like most stand-ups, the goal was to keep it under five minutes. Safety, staffing, priorities, goals for the shift…then get everyone to work.

That morning, someone mentioned there had been a safety incident the night before.

Our site leader was there, and it was the first she’d heard about it.

The notification process had failed.

The meeting immediately shifted into problem-solving mode.

What happened?

Who was notified?

Why wasn’t leadership informed?

How did the process break down?

Everyone focused on understanding the incident.

Then the meeting ended.

As we walked out, my boss turned to me and said something I’ve never forgotten.

“No one asked the most important question.”

I looked at her, confused.

She said,

“Is the employee okay?”

Not one of us had asked.

I was just as guilty.

I’d become so focused on the process that I’d forgotten about the person.

That moment changed the way I think about leadership.

Processes matter.

Root cause matters.

Corrective actions matter.

But people always come first.

Sometimes the most important question isn’t about what happened.

It’s about who it happened to.

Heroes Don’t Scale

One of the most interesting consulting engagements I’ve worked on involved a company preparing to move into a much larger warehouse.

They wanted to document their existing processes so they could replicate them in a new facility four times the size.

There was just one problem.

Most of their processes hadn’t been designed.

They had evolved.

Over the years, people solved problems, created workarounds, and made small adjustments until the operation functioned. It worked…but only because everyone knew the unwritten rules. The tribal knowledge.

That’s not a scalable process.

Scalable processes have three characteristics:

They’re simple.
They’re repeatable.
Most importantly, they don’t depend on a single person.

Too many organizations rely on heroes.

The person who knows every shortcut.

The one everyone calls when something breaks.

The one who can fix almost anything.

Most leaders celebrate that person.

I don’t.

Not because high performers are bad.

But what happens if they’re not here tomorrow?

If your operation can’t survive the absence of one person, you don’t have a high performer.

You have a dependency.

The goal isn’t to eliminate great people.

The goal is to build great systems that allow ordinary people to achieve extraordinary results.

That’s what makes an organization truly scalable.

Have you ever worked somewhere that depended on a hero?

Don’t Forget

The first Master Black Belt I worked with said something that stuck with me:

“I can tell you in 30 seconds whether a leader will fail when they try to implement change.”

Want to know how?

It’s easy.

If they start by saying “Don’t forget to…”

Or “Remember to…”

They’ve already failed.

Sometimes people go one step further and create a sign. A visual “don’t forget.”

Yesterday I saw a perfect example.

I was walking a warehouse with one of their senior leaders. We stopped at a sortation area where associates were building outbound pallets.

A system coding change was coming that would eliminate a problem. Until then, they had designed a temporary workaround.

Each pallet had a three sided cone with a barcode on each side. Bolted on top was a handheld tally counter. The sorter would physically move the box to the right pallet, scan the cone, then tap the counter. At the end of sortation, the quantity on the counter should match the quantity the system said. It was simple. It was brilliant. And…it wasn’t working. The first pallet I looked at had 9 boxes on it…and the counter said 0000.

Nobody was using it.

The problem was not that people forgot. The problem was that the process depended on people remembering.

When your improvement relies on memory, reminders, or signs, you’ve created a system that requires perfect human behavior.

Perfect human behavior doesn’t exist.

The best operational improvements don’t ask people to remember.

They make the right action the easiest action, or the only action.

That’s the difference between training people…and designing systems.

Leaders often assume compliance problems are people problems. More often, they’re design problems. If a process depends on memory, reminders, or discipline, it will eventually fail. Great operational leaders don’t build systems that require people to remember. They build systems where the right action happens naturally.

Measuring Everything, Managing Nothing

Up is good.

Down is good.

I can’t count how many times I saw those words on Air Force dashboards.

I sat through countless meetings reviewing performance metrics. Break Rates. Repeats. Recurs. FMC rates.

Many of the charts had graph with an arrow in the corner accompanied by one of those simple reminders.

That guidance always struck me as odd.

If someone reviewing the dashboard needs a reminder about whether a metric should go up or down, perhaps the metric isn’t telling the story as clearly as we think it is. If a decision maker needs guidance on whether the metric should be moving one way or another, maybe it’s not even an important thing to be tracking.

Which raises some larger questions:

What does a good dashboard actually look like?

How many KPIs should an organization be tracking?

There is no shortage of things to measure. In fact, many organizations today are moving toward hyper-tracking, collecting data on nearly every action an employee takes throughout the day.

The technology exists to measure almost everything.

The challenge is deciding what actually matters.

A dashboard should not be a collection of every metric available. It should be a decision-making tool.

The best dashboards answer three simple questions:

Are we winning?
Where are we struggling?
What action should we take next?

I’ve always believed every KPI should pass a simple test:

If the metric moves significantly tomorrow, what would I do differently?

If the answer is “nothing,” it probably doesn’t belong on the dashboard.

Too many organizations confuse measuring with managing.

More data isn’t always better.

Sometimes it’s just more data.

The goal isn’t to track everything.

The goal is to understand enough to make better decisions.

Continuous Improvement Is Not an Event

A few weeks ago, while touring a large 3PL warehouse near my home, the site leader proudly told me they require one continuous improvement event per quarter.

What struck me was that someone at his relatively senior level viewed continuous improvement as an event…a one-time thing…a task performed on a regular basis, instead of something every person should be doing every single day.

It reminded me of a story from World War II. Eisenhower was once quoted as saying:

“I don’t know what the hell this ‘logistics’ is that Marshall is always talking about, but I want some of it.”

A surprising number of senior leaders seem to have the same surface-level understanding of continuous improvement. They know a few buzzwords, and they know they’re supposed to do this thing, but the deeper philosophy is missing.

I imagine the reason a quarterly requirement exists is because it’s easy to measure. You can check the box, show that you completed it, and create a visible display of action.

In fact, I’ve been in meetings where someone mentioned an idea for a CI initiative, and someone interrupts:

“Wait, didn’t we just do one last month?”

I’ve always said this is the equivalent of going to the dentist twice a year…and that’s it. No brushing. No flossing. Your oral health box was already checked off last September.

True, lasting continuous improvement starts at the lowest level. It comes from individuals making small, incremental improvements to their jobs every single day.

Tiny 1% improvements that, over time, compound into something far more impactful than any quarterly event ever could.

The challenge is that those improvements are much harder to individually measure.

The organizations that truly embrace continuous improvement are not the ones that schedule it once a quarter. They are the ones that build cultures where people are expected, empowered, and encouraged to improve something every single day.

Continuous improvement is not an event.

It’s a mindset, a culture, and a daily habit.

Why Good Systems Don’t Rely on Reminders

I’ve owned the same food processor for decades. It has moved all over the world with me.

The main blade is sharp. Extremely sharp. Combined with the speed and power of the motor, it could easily be dangerous.

But the engineers assumed people would make mistakes. The blade won’t spin unless the bowl is locked into place and the lid is fully attached. Even the ingredient chute has a tall, narrow insert so you can add liquid while the machine is running but still can’t reach the blade.

It’s a layered safety system.

The earliest food processors didn’t have these features. Over time, through redesign and continuous improvement, the safeguards were engineered into the product.

Managers facing gaps in their processes often respond with “We’ll brief the team,” or “We’ll add more signage.”

These are short-term fixes.

Band-aids.

The manufacturer of my food processor could have added more warning labels. They could have put a larger warning in bolder font in the owner’s manual.

Instead, they redesigned the machine.

Real operational improvements work the same way.

The best processes aren’t protected by reminders.

The best processes are protected by layered systems.

Where in your operation are you relying on reminders instead of redesign?

What does it look like when you’re done?

I was recently approached by a small organization working on a stalled WWII bomber restoration. They’d been working on the project for decades and were looking for help moving forward. They had the plane sitting in a barn and were struggling to generate enough interest to continue their work. They had a website. They had a small group of volunteers. But they weren’t able to raise money.

It was clear to me 10 minutes into our conversation: they had no vision. Why were they doing this? What did they want to achieve? I asked a fairly basic question: what does it look like when you’re done? Is the plane sitting on a pad for people to walk around and admire? Or is it in a museum when you can climb inside and sit in the cockpit? Or is it actually flying again so people can admire it at airshows throughout the US? Even within this small group there was no consensus on the most basic question: what they were actually trying to build. Without that, even basic questions of cost, funding, and success were impossible to answer.

They thought their problem was visibility, so they initiated a letter writing campaign. They had designed merchandise. They were even in talks with a local chain of movie theaters to run a small ad during the previews.

They had no mission statement. And they had no organizational goals.

Even the letter writing campaign itself was lacking, as the letters themselves didn’t communicate the vision (since they had none) and had no call to action for the recipients.

You may hear people scoff about vision statements as “corporate speak,” or even worse “consultant speak,” but the fact is truly successful organizations, from businesses to non-profits, use them to articulate their “why.” Why they exist. What they want to achieve.

Without a clear answer to that question, everything else becomes guesswork.

How much money should they be trying to raise? Who should they be asking for support?

Even the restoration work depends on the answer. A static display aircraft, a museum exhibit, and a flying warbird are three completely different missions, with different costs, timelines, and needs.

But until the group decides what the airplane is supposed to become, none of those decisions can be made with confidence.

They believed their biggest obstacle was visibility. That if more people knew about the project, the support would follow. But awareness alone can’t solve a lack of direction.

People don’t rally around activity. They rally around a destination.

Before an organization worries about marketing, fundraising, or publicity, it needs to answer a much simpler question:

What does it look like when you’re done?

Until that question has a clear answer, everything else is just motion.

Who is your Successor?

Leaders should be training the people who will replace them.

Leadership development is not a side initiative. It is not something you squeeze in if the calendar opens up. It is the job.

Organizations that treat developing leaders as a core business advantage outperform those that treat it as a “nice to have.” This is especially true when that development intentionally builds a diverse bench of leaders with different backgrounds, perspectives, and operating styles. Homogeneous leadership teams miss risks. Diverse ones surface them earlier.

I’m a big fan of the TV show Succession, but Logan Roy is a perfect example of what not to do. Over four seasons, he dangled succession in front of at least three of his children. What he never did was invest the sustained time and structure required to actually prepare any of them to take over.

For all his brilliance as a self-made billionaire who rose from poverty in Scotland to run a global media empire, he failed at people development. He never built a real successor.

No one gets to the top on their own. And no organization sustains success without leaders who take development seriously.

Too many leaders treat development like filler. “I have a gap on my calendar, who can I mentor today?” That mindset misses the point entirely.

From your first role as a frontline supervisor to CEO of a global enterprise, the responsibility is the same: identify your replacement, invest in them, and grow them until they are ready.

If you are not doing that, you are not fully doing the job.