Dave Crysler has walked nearly a hundred plant floors over the last 30 years, and most of them have the ghost of a dead 5S program somewhere: faded tape outlines, a shadow board missing half its tools, an audit sheet nobody has touched in years. In this episode, he breaks down why these programs die at the Sustain step and why the failure has almost nothing to do with your team's discipline. Both the consultants selling cleanup blitzes and the software vendors selling audit apps are treating the symptom, and Dave is willing to say so from inside the industry, as someone who just built a 6S audit tool himself.

What You'll Discover:

• Why nobody ever calls a consultant about a failed cleanup, and what that says about where programs actually die

• How 5S gets sold as a project, and why the Sustain step is out of scope before the kickoff even happens

• Why the blitz is billable and the sustain isn't, straight from a consultant willing to say it plainly

• The real reason the messy floor keeps coming back: a missing rhythm, not missing discipline

• How Sort, Straighten, and Shine create clarity, Standardize creates consistency, and Sustain is the accountability step

• The hot-job-versus-audit moment, and what leadership's choice signals to the entire floor

• How surfaced gaps that die going up the chain erode trust one finding at a time

• Why culture is the output of a running system, not the input, and what people need to see before they start believing

• What to do Monday morning, whether your program is dead, dying, or hasn't started yet

If there's faded floor tape somewhere in your building, this episode is the honest autopsy and the restart plan. Start with one work center, build the audit rhythm before you expand anywhere, and give your team a reason to believe that raising their hand matters.