GA 648 | Discovering Lean in High School with Ted Pendergrass
Gemba Academy Podcast: Lean Six Sigma | Toyota Kata | Productivity | LeadershipShow Notes
Most lean practitioners spend their careers trying to change the minds of adults who have been doing things the same way for decades. Ted Pendergrass decided to start earlier. Over 20 years coordinating a career technical education program at a California high school, he brought 5S, practical problem-solving, and Yellow Belt certification to students who had never heard of lean. The conversation covers what actually stuck, what surprised him, and what the rest of the lean community could do to help.
In this episode you’ll learn:
How a cabinet maker’s instinct for efficiency led to lean teaching (4:57)
What happens when high schoolers 5S their Google Drives (6:57)
Why practical problem solving opens students’ eyes more than any other unit (9:06)
How student tours reveal whether lean is actually taking root (12:22)
Why education is not the most lean process and what chunking has to do with it (13:34)
How to teach students to use AI as a tool rather than a crutch (15:53)
Why CTE programs are the right entry point for spreading lean (19:46)
What a Yellow Belt certification does for a student in a job interview (21:51)
How the California Partnership Academy model keeps students engaged and career-ready (24:18)
Why getting companies inside schools changes what students believe is possible (29:00)
What practitioners outside education can do to plant lean seeds in their communities (30:49)
“If you have to ask if it’s good enough, it probably isn’t.” – Ted Pendergrass
Keep Learning
Ted’s seniors earned Yellow Belt certification as a capstone to a three-year lean program. If that kind of structured progression interests you for your own team or organization, the certification path is worth a close look.
Learn More About Certifications at https://www.gembaacademy.com/solutions/certifications
Get All the Latest News from Gemba Academy
Stay current on new courses, podcast episodes, and continuous improvement resources. Sign up for the Gemba Academy newsletter at gembaacademy.com/news
What Do You Think?
If you had two hours with a classroom of high school students, which lean concept would you start with and why?
More from Gemba Academy Podcast: Lean Six Sigma | Toyota Kata | Productivity | Leadership
Most kaizen practitioners know the moment when a skeptic turns. It can take a day, a week, or nine months, but something clicks and the person who crossed their arms at the start is now telling the VP what their line accomplished. Adam Lawrence has spent decades collecting those moments, and he has built a framework around making them more likely to happen. That framework just got a significant overhaul.
Most people who feel overwhelmed blame their schedule. Peggy Sullivan argues the diagnosis itself is wrong. Time poverty has nothing to do with time management and everything to do with capacity, and until you start subtracting, no amount of better planning will get you out from under it.
Value stream mapping is one of the most familiar tools in lean practice. Christian Wolcott has spent 25 years using it with clients from Toyota suppliers to NASA, and he arrived at a question that most practitioners never think to ask: what if you mapped your own life the same way? The seed came not from a client engagement or a sensei, but from his daughter, who sketched a rough timeline on a note card after joining him on a Japan study tour. That sketch became a book, and the book became a method.
Most lean practitioners know the theory of constraints. Fewer apply it before they start fixing things. Hessam Vali, a manufacturing consultant and MES software founder based in Wichita, argues that most improvement efforts fail because they target the wrong kinks in the hose. His framework is deceptively simple: if the deepest constraint is still in place, no one will ever see your work.
Most resistance to lean is blamed on the wrong thing. Ben Morley, an Air Force pilot turned Lean Six Sigma consultant, argues the tools are never really the problem. The breakdown almost always lives somewhere between leadership buy-in and an assumption nobody thought to question. His conversation with Ron Pereira covers cockpit emergencies, a $5 million backlog that dissolved from a single customer phone call, and what a caterpillar turning to soup has to do with organizational transformation.