Is there anyway Kano could include a tx in the next block? I'm trying to consolidate some payouts and I've put a few on there but obviously too low.
Well it will be in the block if it fits and it's in the pool's mempool 
We confirm any and all transactions but in tx reward order - meaning the block will be full even if there's only zero fee transactions.
FYI this might change soon back to similar to how it was before where the block change first work usually had no zero fee transactions.
As I mentioned before, the update to 0.13.0 caused a double in the block change time (but still almost always less than 1 second)
I'll see once I sort out 0.13.1 if it can still be full or just ignoring zero fee transactions for the first work after a block change.