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

Gotcha Walks – Bruce Hamilton talks about his early experience with Gemba walks and whether you are observing to understand or to find fault.

Your Brain is Fine. Your System is Overloaded. – Tonianne DeMaria explains why your brain isn’t the problem, the way your work is set up is, and that is something you can change.

Lean Leadership: Why Asking Questions Is Harder Than Having All the Answers – Mark Graban talks about the challenge to stop giving answers and start asking questions instead.

What Exactly Is AB Control at Toyota? – Christoph Roser explains AB control, how it’s relate to one-piece flow, and smooth product flow.

Lie #5: People Need Feedback – Christopher Chapman shares a video about employee feedback and his management perspective from Deming.

Strategy is Doing – Making Strategy Fun Again (Part 5) – Pascal Dennis concludes a series of posts on strategy describing the continual interplay between reflection and action.

The Case for Intentional Imbalance: Why an Effective Brain, Leader, and Designer Needs Asymmetry – Kevin Meyer shares lesson in leadership that asymmetry creates genuine attention and real learning.

Occam’s Razor and Lean Thinking – Ron Pereira discusses simplicity and going to the gemba when faced with a problem.

Are Your Five Whys Turning into a Tangled Mess? – John Knotts talks about how to avoid chasing symptom and debating perspective when using five whys to uncover the root cause.

Everyone Improving Every Day – Alen Ganic says that everyone improving every day requires a fundamental shift in how leaders think about improvement.

Insource What Matters: A Lesson from Toyota for Lean Practitioners in the Age of AI – Tyson Heaton shares Toyota’s decade-long journey to insource critical software capabilities offers a crucial lesson: lean practitioners must develop technology fluency now.

Why Most Improvements Don’t Stick (And What to Do About It) – Jeff Roussel talks about the importance of sustainability in continuous improvement.

How to Measure the Impact of Your Continuous Improvement Program – Elise Miller talks about what to measure, how the numbers actually work in practice, and what organizations with mature programs have learned about connecting CI metrics to outcomes that executives and boards care about.

Why Lean Fails: It’s Not the Methodology — It’s the Management – Mark Graban explain the  gap between Lean works but not every organization that adopts Lean gets the results it promises. is almost always a leadership problem, not a methodology problem.