Lean Certification Program: Certified Lean Facilitator

Take your lean leadership skills to the next level with the Certified Lean Facilitator Course—a self-paced online program designed for professionals who coach teams, lead improvement events, and sustain a culture of continuous improvement. This advanced training builds on lean fundamentals and emphasizes the interpersonal, strategic, and facilitation capabilities essential to guiding lasting transformation. 

Note: The Certified Lean Practitioner program or equivalent is recommended as a pre-requisite for this course.

Through dynamic audio-visual lessons, real-world case studies, and practical exercises, you'll explore advanced facilitation, problem-solving coaching, and organizational alignment tools. The course covers critical topics such as Change Management, Training Within Industry (TWI), Strategy Deployment, and 3P events—equipping you to lead cross-functional efforts and develop team problem-solving capability.

Participants have direct access to experienced instructors for feedback, mentoring, and support throughout the course. With up to 12 months to complete the program, you'll graduate as a Certified Lean Facilitator, ready to coach others, align strategies, and champion lean transformation across your organization. For a group quote or for customization, contact us.

Course Objectives

• Facilitate High-Impact Improvement Activities: Lead Kaizen and 3P events, guide teams through A3 problem-solving, and coach structured PDCA cycles with confidence and clarity.
• Coach Teams for Lean Thinking: Apply advanced facilitation tools, team dynamics exercises, and coaching techniques to strengthen team engagement and ownership.
• Align Organizational Strategy and Daily Execution: Facilitate effective strategy deployment (Hoshin Kanri), translate goals into actionable metrics, and support daily management routines.
• Lead Change and Build Capability: Implement cultural change using frameworks such as Training Within Industry (TWI) and the Skills Development Matrix to grow team competency and resilience.
• Support Continuous Improvement Across Functions: Extend lean practices across departments and external partners, guiding them through value stream mapping, standardized work, and flow design from a leadership perspective.

The Certified Lean Facilitator course builds on Lean Practitioner fundamentals and develops the leadership, facilitation, coaching, and organizational alignment skills needed to guide teams through improvement work and sustain a Lean culture.

Introduces the course structure, project expectations, facilitator certification requirements, and how participants will apply the material through a Lean facilitation project.

Reviews core Lean principles, the Seven Wastes, and the role of Lean leaders in creating daily improvement, team ownership, and sustainable behavior change.

Covers daily management, leader standard work, Training Within Industry, skills development matrices, cross-training, and the leadership routines needed to support continuous improvement.

Develops core facilitation skills, including team facilitation, brainstorming tools, meeting structure, participation techniques, and methods for helping groups move from discussion to action.

Introduces project management practices for Lean improvement efforts, including planning, scoping, team coordination, follow-up, accountability, and execution discipline.

Covers advanced facilitation techniques, team ground rules, change management, resistance, engagement challenges, and common obstacles to sustaining practices such as 5S.

Teaches participants how to facilitate current state and future state value stream mapping workshops using case examples from administrative and service environments.

Focuses on A3 problem solving, root cause analysis, causal analysis tools, solution implementation, PDCA thinking, problem-solving coaching, daily kaizen, and the Improvement Kata.

Covers how to plan, lead, and execute kaizen events and 3P events, including event preparation, team roles, execution methods, case examples, and follow-up.

Introduces policy deployment, Lean metrics, strategy deployment models, organizational alignment, daily execution, and the connection between improvement activity and business priorities.

Explores how to extend Lean thinking beyond individual departments to suppliers, partners, support functions, and the broader extended value stream.

Develops coaching capability through Lean coaching frameworks, mindsets and behaviors, visual coaching tools, developing others, systems thinking, and coaching methods that help sustain improvement.

Participants complete a Lean Facilitator project demonstrating their ability to guide others, facilitate improvement work, coach problem solving, and support sustainable Lean implementation. Participants have up to 12 months to complete the program and earn the Certified Lean Facilitator certificate.