Creating a Common Language for Continuous Improvement

Spend time in any modern organization and you’ll notice something fascinating and frustrating: every team seems to speak its own language. The continuous improvement group is deep into DMAIC projects and Green Belt certifications. Down the hall, the project management team debates Waterfall versus Agile while developers plan sprints and retrospectives. Meanwhile, operations focuses on productivity measures and strategic KPIs.

Here’s the irony: despite speaking different “languages,” everyone is after the same goal—delivering maximum value to customers in the most efficient way possible. Yet instead of building bridges, specialized jargon often creates walls. If you want people across the business to truly collaborate, you need to strip out the jargon and start speaking a common language.

Erin Heuser

This challenge shows up in every industry, but is particularly acute in healthcare. To explore how improvement teams tackle this reality, I spoke with Erin Heuser, Manager of Process Improvement at The James Cancer Hospital. As she explains, “In healthcare, people are inherently firefighting. You have a lot of Type A personalities. There’s a problem, you fix it and you move on.” In an environment like that, it can be difficult to slow down in the name of DMAIC.

Why Jargon Gets in The Way

While specialized terminology serves a purpose, it has many unintended consequences. The most problematic of which is exclusion. When teams speak in acronyms and specialized terms, they can unintentionally shut out people who have valuable perspectives to share. Three better habits:

• Use plain language first, terms second: Introduce concepts in everyday language, then layer in the technical terms once everyone’s on the same page.
• Translate, don’t assume: If you say “WIP caps,” also explain, “limits on how many things we work on at once.”
• Tie back to purpose: Always connect jargon-heavy concepts to why they matter for the business or the customer.

Plain language isn’t about dumbing things down, it’s meant to invite more people into the problem-solving process. If the goal is to improve how we work and deliver value, everyone needs to be part of the conversation. When new methods arrive wrapped in fancy terms, people tune out. Others stay in the room but feel shut out of the discussion. That subtle exclusion can harden into defensiveness, as Erin Heuser at The James experienced.

When improvement teams at The James started talking about "non-value added" work, people got offended. "What do you mean that doesn't add value?" they'd ask. The breakthrough came when they reframed it: "If the customer's not willing to pay for it, then it's not value added. Not saying it's not necessary, but it's not value added." By creating a "non-value added but necessary" category, they acknowledged the reality of healthcare and government work while still helping people see through the customer's lens.

How to Create Shared Understanding

Creating a common language sounds simple, but we know that’s far from the truth. When we say “ditch the jargon,” it’s not enough to just tell people what not to say. We need to model what clearer communication looks like in practice.

Here are a few swaps that invite more people into the conversation:

The transformation becomes visible when you hear teams naturally adopting plainer language. Five years ago, you wouldn't have heard "voice of customer" in the hallways of The James. Now teams routinely ask, "What are the people we serve asking of us, and what expectations do we need to meet or exceed?" And in healthcare, those people can be several groups: patients, of course, but also physician, vendors, and employees.

Anchor Every Conversation on Three Universal Questions

Every improvement methodology, despite its unique language, ultimately addresses three fundamental questions:

1. What problem are we solving? Define the gap between today and the desired state.
2. How will we solve it? Identify causes, test solutions, and fit the approach to the context.
3. How will we make it stick? Implement, measure, and sustain improvements.

By starting every conversation with these questions, teams can quickly align on objectives before diving into methodology-specific approaches.

Making it Practical in Your Organization

So how do you translate this from theory into everyday practice?

At The James, they anchor every project with a standardized project charter, but everything else adapts to what makes sense for each situation. Whether it's a DMAIC project or a simple workflow improvement at the clinic level, the questions remain the same: Can you quantify the problem? Can you show us how big the problem is? What's the gap between that and where we want to be? What's the root cause? What improvements best solve our problem and how do we monitor and sustain the improvements?

This flexibility matters because rigid adherence to methodology can demotivate teams, especially in fast-paced environments like healthcare. Sometimes the improvement is "short and sweet"—a quick 5S exercise or a rapid A3.

Practical Steps to Make it Stick

Building a common language isn’t something you announce once and expect everyone to adopt. It has to be modeled and reinforced across every level of the organization.

Start with leadership. Leaders set the tone. At The James, the transformation began when leadership committed to training 90% of their leaders in process improvement methodology. Training broke down the language barrier. Now, when leaders speak with healthcare professionals, they center discussions around customer impact.

Adapt your approach to your environment. Traditional week-long Kaizen events don’t fit in healthcare. Instead, The James uses rapid improvement events—focused 4–8 hour sessions that maintain momentum without pulling entire teams away from patient care. “You better make sure you’re coming out with something that’s going to stick,” Erin notes, because those hours are expensive.

Celebrate the language shifts. Recognize teams not just for outcomes but for cross-team collaboration, a commitment to the customer, centering discussions on value delivered.

Make it part of how you do business. The ultimate goal is a place where, as Erin describes, “problem-solving becomes how we do business—from the person who checks you in at the front desk to the CEO of the hospital.”

The Path Forward

Creating a common language doesn't mean abandoning the sophisticated tools and techniques that make each methodology powerful. Instead, it means building bridges that allow specialized knowledge to flow freely across organizational boundaries.

When a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt can easily collaborate with a Scrum Master, when a Change Management specialist can seamlessly support a DevOps transformation, and when executives can see how all improvement efforts connect to customer value—that's when organizations truly accelerate their improvement journey.

The goal isn’t to make everyone speak identically. The goal is shared understanding. As Erin reminded me, "It's not about the tools, it's about solving the problem and fitting a solution to that specific problem." After all, whether we call it kaizen, continuous improvement, or lean thinking we're all trying to get better at serving our customers and that's a goal worth speaking about clearly.