Keynote from Oliver Conger from British Rototherm at Gemba Summit 2025
Oliver Conger of British Rototherm delivered one of the most transformational stories at Gemba Summit 2025, sharing his journey from corporate burnout to lean excellence.
Fifteen years ago, Oliver and his brother bought a 150-year-old manufacturing business with 108 people and two sites that designed and made instrumentation solutions. What felt like a dream come true on day one quickly became a nightmare, and Oliver spent the next five years making things worse through ill-advised acquisitions, disastrous ERP implementations, and consistently letting customers and people down. When he discovered two second lean around 2015, things began to improve – factories got cleaner, weekly resignations turned into smiling faces, and improvements started happening. But after the initial cultural transformation, British Rototherm hit a plateau.
The breakthrough came four years ago when Oliver reluctantly sent three people to a new Toyota mentoring program set up by the Welsh Government. Despite his skepticism about consultants and PowerPoint presentations, something magical happened. Those three people changed – their behaviors, attitudes, and the way they talked about work transformed them into inspirational figures within the business.
They went all in, eventually sending 70% of his people through the program over four years. The results have been extraordinary: British Rototherm now hosts lean events with Toyota, was named the Lean Exemplar for the entire UK submarine program, and recently hosted the top 25 business leaders from that multi-billion dollar program at their site. Oliver’s presentation focused on the four biggest takeaways that created depth in their lean journey and an unexpected fifth benefit that’s preparing them for an AI-driven future.
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Key takeaways
1. Clarity of Leadership Roles
Oliver emphasized that defining what leaders are responsible for and what’s expected of them requires real thought and can lead to difficult decisions. After spending five years creating a happy workplace with minimal labor turnover, British Rototherm realized they weren’t holding leaders to the same standards as team members, which was ultimately letting everyone down.
Oliver shared a powerful video clip of Mr. Masaaki Imai, who stated that the three most important requirements for successful kaizen and lean are: top management commitment, top management commitment, and top management commitment. Without absolute clarity on leadership expectations and unwavering commitment from the top, lean transformations stall. This isn’t just about having leaders who support lean – it’s about leaders who embody it through their daily actions and hold themselves to the highest standards.
2. Clarity of Team Member Roles
Beyond leadership, every team member needs to understand their specific responsibilities and expectations. Oliver cited Peter Drucker’s five basic needs of every job holder, with number one being “agree what is expected of me.” British Rototherm writes down the expectations for each team member with absolute specificity, ensuring everyone knows exactly what success looks like in their role.
This clarity eliminates ambiguity and empowers people to take ownership of their work, knowing precisely where the boundaries are and what standards they’re measured against.
3. Facts and Data – Water Is Wet, Rocks Are Hard
Oliver used a memorable phrase to drive home the importance of fact-based decision making: “Water is wet. Rocks are hard. You can’t argue it.” British Rototherm had been extremely opinion-based in their decisions, but transformed themselves into a fact-based organization. Getting those facts was hard – they didn’t have information readily available, so they invested significant time and effort to collect data and turn it into useful information. Now, facts are available everywhere around their facility so people can do their jobs effectively.
As Deming said, “Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.” They implemented their own Andon system modeled after Toyota’s, where every workstation has a green light and a button. When team members press it for a problem, their light turns red and the team leader receives a Microsoft Teams message immediately.
The team leader thanks the person, makes the area safe, either takes the problem away or solves it, and logs it in their system. After two years, they have data on all their biggest problems, enabling effective problem-solving. When you have facts and data and solve problems with proper tools learned from Toyota, the problems don’t come back – you start seeing problems as treasures and opportunities to learn.
4. Coach and Challenge – Give Them a Full Day’s Work
The message: “Challenge your people, coach and challenge to achieve the incredible.” Don’t give people half a day’s work and let them coast – give them a full day’s work and coach them to help them succeed.
Oliver connected this to what Ryan Tierney must be doing at Spring Metal, challenging his team to achieve the incredible. The biggest gains in any organization are locked up in the people, but only if leaders are willing to coach and challenge them to reach levels they didn’t know they were capable of achieving.
5. Structure – Make the Structure Happen to the Day
Oliver’s favorite quote of the year: “The day doesn’t get to happen to you. Make the structure happen to the day.” Be on the offensive, not the defense. Don’t let the day hammer you with everything it’s got – instead, create structure that dictates how the day unfolds. He shared standardized work for a Toyota supervisor in Japan, showing the incredible level of detail they go through on an hourly basis and the tools they use each hour.
Every year he looks at it and still cannot fathom the level of structure built into that standardized work. British Rototherm is putting more and more structure around their business step by step, but each layer reveals more appreciation and respect for the depth of system Toyota has developed.
Alan mentioned similar principles earlier in the day about taking control of your diary and structuring it around Gemba time – this theme of deliberate structure rather than reactive firefighting runs throughout lean excellence.
6. Depth Accelerates AI and Automation (The Unexpected Benefit)
British Rototherm’s vivid vision includes becoming an “alien dreadnought factory” – a sci-fi inspired future of advanced manufacturing.
What Oliver didn’t anticipate was how their lean depth would absolutely accelerate their journey into AI and automation.
Why? Because AI requires exactly the same things: a continuous improvement mindset, quality data, challenging ways of thinking and working, and significant structure. Over the past 12 months, they’ve added two AI employees to their org chart with names, clarifying their roles just like human employees.
These AI employees get things wrong, need training, coaching, and development. British Rototherm challenged their design team to create a fuel level sensor that could be manufactured with no human touch – something the team initially said wasn’t possible. They made it happen. Oliver shared a powerful video of tech investor Masayoshi Son discussing artificial superintelligence (ASI) – predicting that by 2035, we’ll have intelligence 10,000 times smarter than the human brain.
His question to the audience: how many times more super can you be if you build depth into your lean journey?
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