Matt Zayko, Head of Global Lean Office, GE HealthCare: Why Change Fails After It Works
On this episode of People Solve Problems, host Jamie Flinchbaugh welcomes Matt Zayko, Senior VP and Head of the Global Lean Office at GE HealthCare. Matt brings one of the broadest lean backgrounds in the field, and the conversation traces how that breadth shaped his thinking about what makes change actually last.
Matt describes his lean origin story as being in the right place at the right time. As a graduate student in industrial engineering at the University of Michigan in the early 1990s, his advisor connected him with John Shook, who had just arrived from Toyota. Surrounded by thinkers like Jeff Liker, Al Ward, and Durward Sobek, Matt studied how Toyota developed products in half the time and with better quality, then applied that learning in industry roles at Chrysler, Delphi, and Pall under Danaher. He later spent fifteen years with the Lean Enterprise Institute, including work on Jim Morgan's lean product and process development team, before joining GE in 2021 and ultimately leading lean for GE HealthCare. Jamie notes a shared concern from their parallel paths: too many practitioners lock in what they learned early and apply it as dogma. Matt agrees, calling the confusion of principles with dogma one of the lean community's real failure modes.
Asked about a particularly difficult problem, Matt goes straight to a lesson from his early career. Being technically right, he explains, is only half right. As a young engineer, he was convinced his solution was correct, and on paper it was. But the same idea had been proposed before and never sustained, so people had lost trust that anything would stick. The deeper insight followed: the problem is rarely improving; it is sustaining. Ideas are often only 80% right, and without a management system that catches the remaining 20%, the old problems return, and the people who invested in the change lose hope. Matt calls this the go slow to go fast approach, and he argues the sustainment side of change still gets far less attention than it deserves.
The conversation then turns to breaking down problems in complex environments like product development and healthcare, where feedback arrives slowly, and the consequences of decisions may not be felt for months. Matt's advice is to recreate the gemba. Because a development program is a learning cycle rather than a repeating system, teams have to deliberately reconstruct how the work really happened on something real, such as a recently launched product. Visualizing that work, he says, is one of the most powerful starting points available, and from there a team can diagnose, set a target condition, and run the play again.
On collaboration, Matt is direct: problem solving is a team sport. He credits GE's consistent problem-solving process as a standard that lets everyone read a problem the same way, but he stresses that the paper only matters if people build it together. When colleagues see their fingerprints on the document, ownership replaces resistance, and implementation moves fast.
Matt closes with what inspires him about GE HealthCare: proof that a company more than 125 years old can transform. If it can be turned around there, he says, it can be turned around anywhere, and the lean community needs more examples like it.
Learn more about Matt's work at www.gehealthcare.com, connect with him on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/matt-zayko-b3522811, and find his book, The Power of Process: A Story of Innovative Lean Process Development, on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/dp/0367690306.
