Overview

Why these guides exist

A waste walk surfaces where effort is going — how much of the sprint was rework, how much was work a machine should have done, how much evaporated into meetings that didn’t produce anything. The readout is valuable on its own, but on its own it’s diagnosis without treatment. The team leaves the readout with a clear picture of the problem and no structured way to turn that picture into action.

That’s the gap these guides close. Each one takes one category of waste, points you at the root cause, and walks the team through a workshop designed to produce specific actions — with named owners and measurable recovery.

The format for every workshop follows the pattern I described in My formula for running a successful workshop — goals, impact, audience, roles, pre-homework, agenda, exercises, action-item capture. That consistency matters. A facilitator who has run one of these will pick up the others without relearning the choreography.

The five guides

• GembaKai readout — the gateway session a team runs at the close of a sprint of activity logging. Walk the readout deck, frame the productivity opportunity, separate what the team controls from what it influences, and pick the next workshop from the data. One-hour timebox.
• Rework workshop — for tracing rework hours back to their origin in the delivery pipeline. Four origin categories, 5 Whys or fishbone for root cause, A3 for systemic issues, event storming as a preventive follow-on.
• Automation workshop — for surfacing manual work the team has normalized. Five automation domains, cost × frequency × people, 2×2 ROI matrix with a Theory of Constraints overlay, scenario-list scoping of the first increment.
• Planning workshop — for finding meeting overhead, late decisions and external dependency friction. SWOT opener, meeting audit, strategic event storming on sprint decisions, Force Field Analysis on every committed action.
• Event storming workshop — for mapping a business process end-to-end with engineers, customers and subject-matter experts in the same room. The canonical Blueprinting-phase workshop; also the natural preventive follow-on when the rework workshop surfaces unclear business events as a root cause.

Picking the right workshop

The GembaKai readout is the gateway — start here. It’s a one-hour exploratory session that walks the team through what the sprint actually showed and points to the next workshop from the data, not from gut feel. There are three other workshops that are follow-on exercises, each targeting a category surfaced by the readout. Event storming is different: it’s a design workshop for mapping business events before implementation starts, not a waste-reduction workshop.

If you’re responding to a waste-walk readout, run the workshop that matches the dominant category. If one category clearly dominates, run that workshop. If waste is spread evenly across the three, run them in sequence — usually rework first, because solving rework tends to eliminate the fix-meetings that were piling up inside the planning-waste number.

Here’s a rough heuristic:

• You just finished a sprint’s worth of activity logging → start with the GembaKai readout. Don’t pick a workshop without the data backing it.
• Rework is the dominant color on the readout → run the rework workshop. It’s almost always the highest-leverage starting point because rework upstream turns into everything else downstream — manual validation, defensive meetings, blocked dependencies.
• Automation/manual hours dominate → run the automation workshop. Engineering time that should have been code but was clicks, copy-paste or manual deploys.
• Planning hours dominate → run the planning workshop. This is the hardest of the three waste-walk workshops because planning waste is diffuse — a hundred small things rather than one big one.
• All three are significant → rework first, then automation, then planning, at two-sprint intervals so each workshop has time to land real change before the next.
• You’re at the start of a new product increment (or a rework workshop traced back to unclear business events as the root cause) → run the event storming workshop. Not a waste-walk response; a design workshop that produces the shared event map the rest of the Blueprinting phase builds on.

The process guide

The workshop guides call out specific techniques — SWOT, 5 Whys, fishbone, A3, pre-mortem, force-field analysis and others. Rather than redefine each one inside every workshop, the process guide collects them into a tool library with worked examples and authoritative references.

If you’re facilitating a workshop and hit a technique you’re not familiar with, click through from the workshop page — or start at the process guide and browse. If you’re already comfortable with the technique, the inline summary in the workshop is enough to keep moving.

How results land back in the readout

Every workshop produces an action-item list with owners, expected recovery, and a review date. That list doesn’t live in a meeting note somewhere — it tracks back to the same waste-walk data the workshop started with. Next sprint’s waste walk tells you whether the actions moved the number. If they did, the action closes and the team celebrates. If they didn’t, something was wrong with the root cause, the action, or the owner, and the next workshop has new material to work with.

The goal isn’t a perfect workshop. The goal is a team that gets measurably better at delivery, one two-week cycle at a time.