Topic(s)
- People-centric leadership
Join BTP for an engaging one-day workshop where you and your team will build bicycles while experimenting with safer, more efficient work methods. All bicycles assembled will be donated to a charitable cause.
In a simulated company environment, this hands-on session mirrors real-world challenges like team engagement, onboarding, training and scalable systems — offering a chance to step into the reality of leaders and team members creating stability, capability and improvement together.
Explore a practical, people-centered approach to supervisor development, strengthening your ability to coach, lead and improve processes for stronger teams, inclusion and resilience.
Through repeated improvement cycles, experience what it means to empower individuals while enhancing your organization’s ability to adapt and thrive.
Gain insight into how leadership habits and structured routines unlock innovation, collaboration and ownership — even in complex environments.
BTP introduces two foundational frameworks:
- Training within industry (TWI): Routines for teaching skills, strengthening relationships and improving methods — building consistency, quality and engagement
- Toyota Kata: A coaching and improvement routine for navigating the unknown with a scientific, goal-oriented approach
Aligned with Toyota’s people system, these routines help leaders coach daily, set clear standards and build a culture of trust and continuous development.
These methods support lean cultures where people and performance grow. Supervisors lead transformation using tools that improve safety, reduce variation, increase efficiency and drive sustainable improvement.
Led by BTP enablers John Vellema, Thomas Ilskov
Ideal for:
- Executives, managers and directors focused on continuous improvement
- Coaches and trainers building leadership and problem-solving skills
- Lean and HR leaders shaping culture
- Anyone aiming to grow in coaching, problem-solving and process improvement
By participating, you’ll gain valuable skills and contribute to a meaningful cause — connecting people, purpose and progress in the spirit of AME.
- Experience a realistic, hands-on environment simulating frontline challenges such as onboarding, training and continuous improvement – while building bicycles for a charitable cause.
- Learn practical leadership routines to develop, support and coach team members effectively — built on the principles of training within industry (TWI).
- Gain tools to build a resilient lean culture through daily coaching and deliberate practice using the Toyota Kata improvement and coaching patterns.
- Understand how to embed people-centered systems into operations that foster ownership, consistency and sustainable growth across all levels of the organization.
- Walk away with actionable skills you can immediately apply to empower teams, improve processes and lead with purpose — while making a meaningful contribution to the community.
This highly interactive workshop dedicates 70-80% of the time to hands-on activities in a simulated company environment. Participants assemble bicycles to explore onboarding, frontline leadership and continuous improvement. All bicycles are donated to charity.
About 30 minutes in, teams begin building bicycles. A second round follows to establish a baseline in performance, coordination and leadership behavior.
Teams rotate through three learning stations:
- TWI job instruction (JI): Training team members
- TWI job relations (JR): Building trust and handling challenges
- TWI job methods (JM): Improving jobs safely and efficiently
Each team applies new practices during rotations.
Toyota Kata guides coaching throughout the day, with team leaders using the kata routine to support learning and improvement.
The workshop ends with two or three final rounds of bicycle building, applying TWI and kata routines to achieve measurable gains in safety, quality, teamwork and efficiency.
Business Through People (BTP) helps organizations create sustainable success by building strong people systems and believes that individuals and teams — when enabled with the right mindset, skills and support — hold the key to lasting improvement, innovation and resilience.
The company specializes in globally certified programs within training within industry (TWI) and Toyota Kata. These structured, hands-on methods build leadership, coaching and problem-solving capabilities — strengthening safety, quality, adaptability and performance across industries and cultures.
All programs follow global certification standards and include:
- Small groups (6–10 participants) for deep, focused learning
- Practical training applied to real work tasks — no PowerPoint
- Certification levels: Basic training, facilitator and train-the-trainer
- Consistent content and delivery across sites, languages and regions
BTP's approach is more than training. Through its enabling process, the company co-develops systems and routines with its clients to embed continuous improvement into daily operations — ensuring ownership, standardization and cultural anchoring.
At the heart of everything BTP does are its core values:
- People: BTP believes there must always be room for people’s diverse needs, desires and dreams. With this, ownership and sustainable success will follow.
- Learning: BTP never stops developing. With curiosity and energy, the company strives for mastery and embrace new ways of thinking.
- Servant leadership: BTP grows others through coaching, listening and enabling people to succeed through responsibility and care.
- Courage: The BTP team dares to challenge themselves, their clients and each other — with integrity and with people’s best interest in mind.
With over a decade of experience across five continents and more than 2,500 certified leaders and team members, BTP remains committed to one vision:
Help you create sustainable Business Through People.
Ben Hoseus is a senior enabler and regional partner for Africa at Business Through People (BTP), where he applies continuous improvement principles to drive organizational effectiveness and cultural change. He focuses on developing resilient businesses and guides companies through sustainable, people-centric systems. An active speaker and advisor, Hoseus specializes in business adaptability and transformation across diverse industries.
He collaborates with the Lean Institute Africa to advance lean practices throughout the continent and is committed to fostering environments that enable growth, innovation and the realization of full potential. 
Thomas Ilskov is a master enabler and regional partner for the Nordic region at Business Through People ApS, with over 10 years of experience applying TWI methods in various work environments.
His primary focus is on integrating training within industry methods from traditional manufacturing into administrative and support functions. Ilskov has successfully applied these tools in banking and public sector administrative work. Throughout his career in the service sector, he has worked on improvements in customer care and sales organizations, demonstrating the effectiveness of job instruction and job methods in administrative settings.
For the past three years, he has provided clients worldwide with TWI methodologies, helping them enhance their operations wherever standardization is needed. 
John Vellema is the founder and senior master enabler of Business Through People ApS, established in 2012. With a commitment to honest, caring and straightforward communication, Vellema fosters strong relationships with his clients and colleagues.
Renowned as one of the foremost training within industry senior master enablers, he excels in coaching senior leadership to cultivate effective leadership systems. Before founding his company, Vellema made significant contributions to the LEGO Group, where he played a key role in implementing a global job training organization across their manufacturing sites. His experiences are captured in his acclaimed book, "Building a Global Learning Organization: Using TWI to Succeed with Strategic Workforce Expansion in the LEGO Group," which received a Shingo Publication Prize.
As an external Enabler, Vellema has developed a portfolio of successful TWI cases worldwide, earning respect for his humble yet impactful coaching style.
