LEAN GOVERNMENT SUMMIT 2025

No tool creates an inclusive work environment, but some organizational processes are more inclusive by design. Dubbed “Toyota’s Secret” by MIT’s Sloan Management Review, the A3 report is one of the most powerful tools for organizational effectiveness, creativity, and leadership at work. Learn how to use it to work with the full strength of your team’s collective intelligence. Solve problems and seize opportunities with a strategy alignment process that can (more) fully invite and leverage the brains, perspectives, and contributions of your team.

Lex is a Lean coach and communications leader who helps organizations solve problems and navigate the future of work. Lex got her start at The Lean Enterprise Institute where she was founding editor of The Lean Post and co-designed and led communications for LEI's Lean Product and Process Development Initiative under Jim Morgan, former head of product at Ford. At Twitter, Lex was a senior program manager on Twitter’s operational design and effectiveness team where she used Lean thinking and practice to create a safer platform and help Twitter deliver on its original mission of advancing the public conversation. At Ryder System, Inc., she led continuous improvement, learning and culture, and internal communications initiatives to build teams and strengthen Ryder's digital product development processes.

Lex writes for Harvard Business School's Race, Gender and Equity Initiative and is the editor of numerous books including Change Questions by D. Lynn Kelley with John Shook, Moving Money for Impact: A Guide to Gender Lens Investing by Tuti B. Scott; and Follow the Learner: The Role of Leader in Creating a Lean Culture by Dr. Sami Bahri.

Agile/Scrum is usually associated with the development of software and digital tools, but it is a powerful method for developing any kind of complex “product”, including the ones often found in government: reports, strategies, and policies, etc.  

Pawel, an experienced change agent in the worlds of both Agile/Scrum and Lean, will share an overview of the principles, routines and tools of Agile/Scrum so that Lean practitioners can apply them to their own complex knowledge work processes.

Pawel’s professional mission is to help organizations and the people within them to find a more humane way of working together and creating awesome, sustainable results.  A key thought leader at Scrum.org, he teaches and coaches leaders and teams to apply Agile/Scrum to exceed their goals and sustain their gains.  He has deep experience working with both the Public and Private sectors.

The winds may howl, but I will not be swept away.

Isn’t that what we all want when facing the winds of challenge and change? There’s no miraculous way of avoiding being swept away AND there are also some proven ways of being more resilient to change.

Leading change within the Public Service is a challenging endeavor. Being an "agent of change" requires immense energy, resilience, and a commitment to self-care. Join Jean Marleau, a self-described "positive disruptor," as he shares practical tools to help you strengthen your resilience. Discover strategies to navigate challenges, maintain a positive mindset, and sustain your change effort.

Jean Marleau has over 20 years of experience as a public servant, having worked in departments such as Employment and Social Development, The Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages, and Canadian Heritage, where he is presently.  He started on the front lines, bringing services directly to Canadians, and has risen more recently to hold a variety of executive roles.  As a dedicated Lean practitioner, he is passionate about continuous improvement and is particularly interested in the human aspects of organizational change.

Online forms. They’re either so intuitive you hardly notice you’ve filled them in. Or they take so long to complete that you just lose the will to live. Or maybe you’re the one creating the form and trying to gather the information you need. How can you ask for this clearly and make it easy for people to understand? What happens next? And how do you process all this data?! 

These are some of the things the GOV.UK Forms team are dealing with. They are part of the Government Digital Service (GDS) who build and maintain GOV.UK, the UK Government’s website. Their goal is to make digital government simpler, clearer and faster for everyone.

Join Iain Boyd, Engagement lead at GOV.UK Forms, who will talk about their journey and why they’re designing a form builder platform for government.

Session outline:

• Why we’re creating an online form builder for government
• Demo
• Success stories
• Roadmap and what’s next 
• Q&A

Iain is an Engagement lead, specialising in building effective relationships and has worked in broadcasting, renewable energy and government. Currently developing strategic partnerships across the UK Government to make accessing public services simpler, easier and faster by using GOV.UK Forms, an accessible digital form builder. He's passionate about great public services which meet user needs and save taxpayers money!

Previous roles include: linking up the public sector and industry to provide support to extremely vulnerable users during the COVID-19 pandemic; leading engagement for the Government Data Exchange; running the UK's top digital and technology talent program; and promoting cross-sector UK excellence, including technology, with senior business and academic leaders.

Kanban is one of the most powerful tools in the Lean toolkit. It's simple, instinctive, and tremendously effective. So why do we occasionally get stuck or drop using it altogether?

In this session, Heidi will touch on the following topics: 

• what gets in the way of using personal kanban effectively
• practical tips for embedding the kanban practice seamlessly into your work
• how to build a system that endures

Even if you have tried and failed at using kanban before, at the end of this session, you should leave with the knowledge and inspiration you need to build a kanban system that truly works for you.

Heidi Loveall is the Strategy & Performance Operations Manager with Washington State Department of Enterprise Services.  With over 15 years in government, Heidi is deeply passionate about public service and committed to the vision of making government better for Washingtonians. Her specialty is translating big ideas, principles, or technical tools into practical steps that people can take to make impactful improvements for themselves and their customers. When not at work, she is spending time with her children, planning epic parties, and enjoying the Northwest rain.

Alain will speak about how leaders who act as “shields” for their staff tend to get better results from them.  When team members do not need to deal with unnecessary obstacles while executing their daily work—obstacles such as having to managed unplanned requests, noisy distractions, countless interruptions, excessive workload, and competing priorities -- they are more engaged, focused, and productive.

Alain will draw on his real-world experience in facilitating improvement projects and guiding teams in their day-to-day way of working to provide you with practical tips and tools to help you shield your team…and get better results.

Alain is a Lean government and transformation change agent and teacher/mentor. He is also an accomplished and strategic senior Change Management and Project Management professional with over 29 years diverse (military, public service and consultant) work experience and a broad educational background.  He has developed cutting-edge and highly effective approaches to creating and sustaining Lean change in a government setting and managing high performing teams.

Using Continuous Improvement in government can be exciting for teams.  Empowering and engaging the front-line team members is valuable and can unleash some great ideas and countermeasures.  However, coaching from the middle has challenges.  Executive leaders, Directors, Division Directors, Elected Officers as well as middle and front-line leadership need to understand their role in Continuous Improvement. Leader behaviors impact the success of projects and their sustainability.  Some of these Lean behaviors may be different than are found in traditional leadership models. 
 
To address this gap, we created an interactive CI Leader Program. Our goal was to develop leaders as coaches to transform their teams and team culture. We developed a set of tools and resources to support leaders in promoting team engagement in innovative and creative solutions for improving their work.  
 
Kristi, Shannon, and Alenka will share: 

• Why a CI Leader Program is important for leadership development, supporting the efforts of the front-line team members, and ultimately creating a culture of continuous improvement across the organization.
• The journey of discovering what was needed and the framework for building the curriculum
• Our lessons learned and next steps for this program including advancing opportunities for certified leaders  

You will learn to:

• Identify the value of investing in your leaders  
• Define the core concepts and leader behaviors important for empowering and engaging front-line team members in continuous improvement efforts 
• Describe ways to develop a shared learning environment 

Kristi Hoagland, Director of Operational Excellence at Snohomish County, draws upon 23 years of experience in Lean Leadership. Her healthcare leadership background includes overseeing revenue cycle, clinic, and hospital operations, where she successfully implemented and sustained a Lean Management. Kristi’s passion for Lean drives her mission to build programs that cultivate Lean leaders who champion innovation, empower staff, and foster a continuous improvement mindset for the benefit of both employees and residents. 
 
Alenka Fields is a Continuous Improvement Specialist, Project Manager and Change Practitioner for Snohomish County. She has over 20 years of Lean transformation experience as a coach and consultant for a variety of organizations in Healthcare and Insurance, within the US as well as the UK and Canada. Alenka has a passion for coaching and guiding leaders and teams. On her deck overlooking the sound with her husband and doodle is her Zen place. 
 
Shannon Boswell is currently a Continuous Improvement Specialist/PM at Snohomish County as of January 2023.  Shannon brings over 20 years of hands-on Lean experience in healthcare as well as consulting in organization transformation and change management.  Pairing Lean concepts with practical experience, she works with executives, frontline staff, and everyone in-between in the implementation, adoption, sustainment, and realization of successful Lean management.

Our conventional understanding of “efficiency” is incorrect; when organizations focus too much on utilizing resources—that is, keeping people busy-- it actually increases the amount of work there is to do, making the organization as a whole less efficient.  Modig and Ahlstrom call this the “Efficiency Paradox”.  They explain, with simplicity and clarity, how Lean organizations break away from this conventional notion of efficiency by focusing much more on flowing value to their clients.

The art of saying “no” to the trivial many, to reserve time for the Critical Few; prioritizing to avoid overwhelm.

Just as scientists struggled to justify animal play through purely rational explanations, we may be overlooking the vital role of experimentation, social interaction, and apparent inefficiencies in our workplaces. Through this lens, we'll explore how Lean thinking might evolve by understanding that not everything valuable can be measured in terms of immediate productivity.

Many problems we face cannot be solved by quick fixes in isolation; see the whole system and reach deeper to the structures and mindsets that are at play.

Evidence-based strategies to create new and sustained habits, particularly useful in helping teams sustain new flow-creating behaviours.