Calliope Kata

Bill has more than 20 years of progressively responsible experience in complex roles requiring exceptional project coordination, problem solving, and management skills. He has worked with companies from a wide range of industries including IT, specialty chemical, chemical distribution, appliance manufacturing, insurance, higher education and healthcare in the US, Canada, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. Bill has a passion for developing leaders and their teams at all levels from executives to the frontline. He uses the integration of Continuous Improvement methods, Organization Development methods and Design methods to help leaders address their business situations. Bill strives for measurable impact in both the business processes and the people processes that support the business. Bill is skilled at designing and facilitating a range of goal-oriented group experiences from large group (50+) system-level strategic experiences; to Conflict management (both intra-group and inter-group); to Continuous Improvement and Change Processes; as well as Learning/Training sessions. Examples of this work include: serving as a Community Manager of a 300-person Leadership Community for a large software company. Bill created and implemented leadership community concept, produced three community events per year focused on strategy and leadership development. He facilitated conflict management sessions in a healthcare environment between Sr. Staff members, who owned critical initiatives, and Nursing Directors who owned nursing staff. Resolution was gained by building agreements about role clarity and staff practices of working with frontline nursing. He also worked with a manager and her small Pre-Admit Testing team to improve the screening process for high-risk patients prior to surgery. The team shifted from an assembly line structure to a “cell” structure in their work process. This enabled staff to have greater ownership of a group of patients. Completion rate improved from ~60% to ~85%. Bill also has a passion for teaching adults and preparing the next generation of leaders in the disciplines of Continuous Improvement and Organization Development. He has held Adjunct Faculty positions at the Leadership Institute of Seattle’s, Master of Organization Systems program; Seattle University’s Executive Masters of Non-Profit Leadership and currently at Central Washington University’s College of Business in Supply Chain Management.

Lori is a Lean/Six Sigma Master Black Belt who enjoys stretching the minds of others in the worlds of facilitation, strategic thinking, process improvement, organizational development and change management. She has 13 years of work experience in healthcare, state and local government work and higher education. Some of her strategic planning experience in healthcare includes leading multiple state agencies through visioning and strategy development for the Medicaid Information and Technical Architecture (MITA) federal program. She was also highly involved with strategic deployment, including continuous process improvement facilitation, leadership coaching and visual management implementation to help teams achieve strategic objectives throughout the enterprise at CHI Franciscan Health. Lori has a passion for developing people and believes in meeting people where they are in their learning, helping them set the path for success, and then gently pushing them to go further through experimentation, practice and coaching. She has worked with leaders at all levels, from C-Suite executives to frontline staff, and takes pride in helping organizations to keep their customer at the center of every decision. Some of her skills include interactive group facilitation, visioning and strategy deployment, curriculum design and delivery, project management, and various Lean/Six Sigma improvement methodologies (Workout, Change Acceleration Process, Rapid Process Improvement Workshops, Business Analysis, Daily Management, A3 Thinking, Agile/Scrum, Change Management, etc.). She enjoys helping each level of an organization to translate long term strategies and make the “link” to daily operations and watching those goals become reality. Some of Lori’s favorite work includes “blowing up” broken current state processes, helping leaders at all levels and teams to dream big and futuristically then translating that work into an achievable customer-centric reality. Lori also enjoys her position at Central Washington University in the School of Business, where she is a professor and of Lean Six Sigma courses and a coach to local organizations. In February 2017, Lori launched Calliope Consulting, LLC, as a way for her to continue her personal journey of partnering with mission-driven people and organizations. There, she collaborates with other passionate, energized, talented, caring and fun consultants who are focused providing the best for those we serve, every time.