A selection of highlighted blog posts from Lean bloggers from the month of January 2026.  You can also view the previous monthly Lean Roundups here.  

Stratex Fundamentals – Goal Setting – Dennis Pascal says strategic goal setting means leaders should set stretch targets just beyond what the team believes achievable by deeply understanding their business, capabilities, and processes, avoid both timid and unrealistic goals, and also set explicit improvement process targets to build capability over time.

The Outcomes Engine: How Lean Turns Ambition Into Results – Josh Howell argues that Lean functions as an “outcomes engine” that helps organizations bridge the gap between ambition and actual results by making value visible, surfacing problems early, and building systems and capabilities that enable continuous improvement and adaptation rather than merely setting goals.

Standards Capture Your Knowledge – Mak Rosenthal argues that standards are essential because they capture accumulated knowledge by defining what “should be,” providing a shared reference for identifying deviations, learning from them, and improving processes rather than relying on individual judgment.

A Snowstorm, A System Failure, A Leadership Lesson – Alen Ganic uses the example of governments unprepared for a severe snowstorm to argue that leadership should focus not on blame but on learning from system failures and building resilient, improvement-oriented systems through Lean thinking and structured problem solving.

The CEO’s Role in a Continuous Improvement Business System – Mark Graban explains that the CEO’s role in a continuous improvement business system is to design, protect, and model an organizational operating system where daily problem-solving and learning are expected and supported, problems are escalated appropriately, and strategic goals are connected to everyday improvements so that the company learns faster than problems accumulate.

The Role of Lean Team Leader – George Taninecz explains that a lean team leader is a critical non-managerial support role in Lean organizations—especially at Toyota—where the leader helps a small group of frontline team members maintain output, uphold and improve standardized work, train people, and solve problems quickly at the source so that continuous improvement and capability building happen every day.

Stratex Fundamentals – What Drives Achievement? – Pascal Dennis argues that what drives strategic excellence (“StratEx”) achievement is total involvement—smart, capable people continually solving problems supported by well-designed systems that enable their work while minimizing obstacles, and that sustaining this involvement requires leaders to clearly articulate meaningful purpose and engage team members in improvement and innovation.

Lean Is for Speed, Six Sigma Is for Quality? That’s a False Trade-Off. – Mark Graban argues that the common belief that Lean focuses on speed while Six Sigma focuses on quality is a false trade-off because Lean improves flow by removing obstacles, which simultaneously enhances both speed and quality in well-designed systems rather than forcing a choice between them.