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September 9, 2026 Professional Development Meeting
Please join ASCM Grand Rapids as Jim Zelem presents "The Real Root Cause: Culture, Leadership, and the Challenge of Change" on September 9, 2026 at 7:00 PM.
The Real Root Cause: Culture, Leadership, and the Challenge of Change
Even in quality-driven organizations, improvement efforts often stall—not because the tools are wrong, but because we may stop the investigation too soon. Beneath recurring problems, stalled initiatives, and change fatigue are often conditions that traditional process analysis alone may not reveal.
This presentation challenges participants to take root cause thinking one step further. Before changing a process, do we truly understand how the work is being done? What can we learn from the people doing the work, the workarounds they have created, the decisions they make, and the organizational conditions shaping those decisions?
Drawing on real-world experience and insights from the Zelem Trilogy, the presentation examines how leadership behavior, organizational expectations, trust, reinforcement, and culture influence whether improvement takes hold or eventually returns to old habits.
The Zelem Trilogy provides a practical framework for examining sustainable change:
Leadership → Culture → Prevention
- Leadership creates the conditions in which people work, make decisions, raise concerns, and solve problems.
- Culture reflects the behaviors, habits, and norms those conditions reinforce over time.
- Prevention becomes possible when people are trusted and empowered to think upstream, identify problems early, and make appropriate decisions at their level.
The central message is not that quality tools or process improvement methods are inadequate. They are essential. But sustainable improvement requires us to investigate the environment surrounding the process as rigorously as we investigate the process itself.
Because you can't change what you don't understand—and sometimes the real root cause lies beyond the process map.
For questions or assistance, please contact Erin, Chapter Admin [email protected] or (616) 375-1166. Please follow us on LinkedIn.
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Future Meetings
September 9, 2026 Professional Development Meeting
Virtual Zoom Meeting
Jim Zelem presents "The Real Root Cause: Culture, Leadership, and the Challenge of Change"
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