Author of this article: Wendy Manders
Wendy Manders is a coach, facilitator, Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, and change practitioner. She is the author of De Werkplaats (The Workroom), to be published. She works with leaders and teams in organizations where tension exists between direction and space, control and trust.Her work focuses on the interplay between data and dialogue, structure and emotion, leadership and rhythm. She helps organizations navigate the constant movement between formal systems and informal dynamics, without reducing one to the other.Trained as a business economist, Wendy has led and supported complex change initiatives across service organizations and the public sector. While responsible for continuous improvement at Zilveren Kruis, she received the Dutch Kaizen Award, founded by Masaaki Imai.
Her experience includes work with national government bodies such as RIVM and DG Toeslagen, as well as large municipalities. In recent years, her focus has increasingly been on healthcare, where pressure on both systems and people is part of everyday reality.Wendy has worked with obeya for nearly a decade. She studied its origins in Japan, deepened her practice of Deep Democracy in Greece, and was strongly influenced by Ubuntu during her time in South Africa. What she brings into organizations, she practices herself: grounded, human-centered, and constantly moving between system and human.
Better Care, Better Numbers
How Sint Jacob used Obeya to welcome more clients and cut employee absenteeism in half
In this compelling Healthcare case story, Wendy Manders shows how governance with Obeya reduced employee absenteeism from 22.9% to 9% and increased bed occupancy by 8% in seven months, while improving the quality of care.
Sint Jacob, an elderly care organisation in the Netherlands, used Obeya to improve both operational performance and quality of care under significant pressure.
Location Nieuw Delftweide was struggling with:
- staff shortages
- high absenteeism
- financial pressure
- structurally low bed occupancy
Wendy will be speaking on the Obeya Summit on June 26 in Utrecht, and will explain how they arrived at these great results. Give-away: Performance and people happily coincide in this case. As one would hope within the healthcare sector.
What makes this case especially relevant is the way Obeya became more than a visual management system.
The Obeya created a shared space where:
- operational data and human reality became visible together
- difficult conversations could happen openly
- teams learned to steer together instead of react separately
What you’ll learn
- How Sint Jacob reduced absenteeism from 22.9% to 9%
- How bed occupancy improved by 8% within seven months
- Why connecting “above the surface” and “below the surface” conversations matters
- How Obeya strengthened ownership, learning, and decision-making in daily care operations
- Why psychological safety and performance improvement reinforce each other
Download the full article and read the full story
Wendy will be speaking at the Obeya Summit on June 25–26, 2026.
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