Standards are the key to respect for people (or should be).
Overview
It seems that when people think about standards they think in terms of compliance. It’s largely in our language …
- “They didn’t follow the standard.”
- “Are we dealing with a training issue or a compliance issue?”
- ‘Process audits.’ (‘Audit’ tends us toward ‘compliance’.)
This impacts many of the usual things seen in organisations striving for continuous improvement. Leader Standard Work (LSW), Tier Meetings, Problem Solving and the likes will have a strong ‘are you complying?’ flavour if we look at standards as something to be enforced. There is an alternative to thinking of standards in terms of compliance. It will probably feel confronting; it’s a paradigm change.
Join and participate in this conversation Oscar Roche will have with Mark Rosenthal, a deep practical thinker in the real world of operations.
Host Company
Presenter
Mark Rosenthal has over three decades of experience learning on the front lines of continuous improvement, quality improvement, and leadership development across diverse sectors in manufacturing, engineering design, the service sector, and health care.
Before joining the private sector, Mark was a military officer managing heavy equipment maintenance and logistics operations in Korea, the U.S. and Germany as well as questionable activities such as jumping out of serviceable airplanes while in flight.
Mark is co-founder of Kata School Cascadia and blogs at https://theleanthinker.com/.
Agenda
Wednesday, December 16, 2026
Central Time
3:00 p.m. Introduction
3:02 p.m. Conversation (with audience questions)
3:25 p.m. Further audience questions?
3:28 p.m. Wrap up
PARTICIPANT BENEFITS
- The futility of trying to audit your way into standards compliance.
- What Taiichi Ohno really meant when he said “Without standards there can be no kaizen.”
- Sidney Dekker’s model of organizational norms erode standards. (You may well recognize this!)
- An alternative view of the purpose of ‘standards driven by mutual curiosity’.
- The importance of immediate response to issues.
- How standards link to scientific thinking (and thus the Toyota Kata routine).
WHO SHOULD ATTEND
- Operations leaders, all levels
- QA managers
- CI managers
- Compliance managers
- Anyone who wants to try and reduce the risk of standards being documents referred to during audits!
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