Continuous improvement – habit or effort? Or, put more simply, is CI seen as an additional task or part of ‘business as usual’? One of the big challenges when trying to introduce the idea of continuous improvement into an organisation is that – despite assurances to the contrary – many people see it as yet one more extra thing to do in their busy lives. And, of course, in many ways they’re right. Even if we believe that making improvements will, over time, both improve performance and make working life easier, there’s no getting away from the fact that it does take effort to establish new ways of working. Yet, without a routine of consistently resolving the underlying causes of problems and working on opportunities to improve, all of the other elements of the “high performance with ease” culture that I’ve been writing about over the last few months will not deliver their full potential. For long term, sustainable performance CI must be part of the “new state” for the business. Without it, the organisation will not easily respond to changes in its internal and external environment and may become uncompetitive. Equally, without all of the previous “building blocks”, the foundations for continuous improvement will be somewhat shaky, as we will not have created the right conditions for CI to flourish. It is highly likely that problem solving and improvement activities will take significant “exceptional effort”, generally by the few who are deeply convinced of its value and who will get increasingly frustrated that the majority of their colleagues simply don’t “get it” or are unwilling to put the effort in. As we’ll explore further in the next and final article in the series, all of these elements work together as a “system” that delivers “high performance with ease”. Working all of these elements together, my experience shows that it isn’t long before the time freed up through making improvements far exceeds the time invested to make the improvements. Everyone’s life becomes easier and there is more time to work on those actions that will take the business forward – further improvements, developing new products or services, growing people’s skills and so on.
“The Toyota style is not to create results by working hard. It is a system that says there is no limit to people’s creativity. People don’t go to Toyota to ‘work’ they go there to ‘think’.” Taiichi Ohno
Father of the toyota production system It all sounds so easy in theory, doesn’t it? Yet, if your experience of trying to introduce these types of changes is anything like mine, the reality is often anything but!
The Challenge
The challenge before us is how to move from the mindset where improvement action is seen as “yet another thing to do” to one where identifying and acting on problems and opportunities for improvement is accepted by everyone as part of the everyday routine of “how things are done round here.” In other words, people’s thinking needs to change, which in turn requires them to challenge some of their underpinning beliefs and assumptions. As I’ve been learning recently, this requires that individuals take conscious action that results in the “rewiring” of their brain to assimilate these new ideas into their belief system – no small task! I suspect most of us know from experience how hard it is “convince” others to change their beliefs, and neuroscience confirms that all we can actually do is to create a situation that encourages everyone to undertake this work for themselves. So let’s look at what needs to be done organisationally to help this to happen.
Sharing the Idea – “The Pursuit of Perfection”
The foundational idea behind a culture of continuous improvement is as simple as having a belief that improvement is a necessity for ongoing business success and that everyone in the organisation has a role to play in that.
“If a company isn’t continuously improving then it is slowly dying.” Dave Waters
Communicating this idea and the others below is a key first step. After all, the brain’s primary task is helping us to “survive and thrive” in the world, so linking the adoption of CI to the idea that it is a necessary part of the survival of the business, and that not to change is a riskier option, can be a helpful starting point. When we first introduced the idea in Rover Group, it was described as “everyone actually has two jobs”:
- Doing their work
- Improving their work
In other words, we have to believe that, no matter how good we are today, we can always be better and need to take action. One of the reasons I like the term “pursuit of perfection” is that it continually reminds us of this.
Another term I picked up on quite early on my CI journey was “happily discontent”, which for me sums it up wonderfully; the idea that we can hold these two apparently conflicting states of mind at the same time.
- How we’re doing today is OK. It represents the best way we’ve found so far.
- We can always find ways to do things better.
However, this idea is not without its problems:
It’s not really true! When first presented, many people will reject this idea, particularly if they have no real exposure to the information that makes the situation “real”. So some exposure to the management information leading to that conclusion will be helpful – it’s harder to argue with the data. Perhaps more helpful is to link the need to change to benefits to them that are more tangible, like removal of some current difficulties and frustrations, and continuing to “cast the vision” of what the organisation will be like as the impact of the improvements starts to be felt.
We’re not good enough! Another challenge is that it can be easy for people to think that what they’re doing now isn’t good enough and – as I’m sure many readers will recognise – this can often be taken personally as “I’m not good enough”, with its obvious impact on motivation and engagement. A helpful model I was introduced to recently was the “Gain vs. Gap” model as shown in the diagram. All too often we focus on the “Gap” between our current condition and our Ideal State. It’s a little bit like climbing a mountain. What’s in front of you is the amount of the mountain left to climb. It can get demoralising, especially if you reach what looks like the summit only to discover there’s another climb ahead! However, if you take a moment to stop and look back, you’ll appreciate how far you’ve come and the value of the effort you have put in. Then you’ll be re–energised to keep pressing onwards towards the summit. Same idea here. After each improvement step, take time to recognise what has been achieved and it will spur you and your team onward to even greater success.
Making improvements means more work! As mentioned in the introduction, the immediate reaction from many people when we start talking about introducing problem solving and continuous improvement is that it means more work to do. And, however much we dress it up, in the short term they are probably right. New processes and skills need to be learned even if time is allowed in the regular working week to work on the improvements. Fortunately, there’s also enough evidence around to demonstrate that it’s not long before the effort starts to pay back. Performance improves and working life becomes easier. There’s more time to work on improvements too. And, not only that, but the improvement work itself becomes easier the more everyone become familiar with it. So the prize is worth the pain! However, that doesn’t mean that it’s easy to change the mindset of everyone in the organisation to embrace the move to CI and it will take some time and effort before everyone comes to believe in it deeply enough for these new ways of working to be self-sustaining. After all, our beliefs drive our thinking, our thinking influences our feelings, and together they lead to our actions – to engage or disengage.
The danger of perfectionism “Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.” Mark Twain There’s a difference between “the pursuit of perfection” and perfectionism. If we have the latter mindset, it can lead to paralysis, or inaction. Those with perfectionist tendencies will want to work and work at their improvement ideas until they can be implemented perfectly first time. They need to have every detail worked out, or they won’t act. Of course, the net result is that nothing changes, because they’ll never get there! “Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence!” Vince Lombardi, American football coach By contrast “pursuit of perfection” recognises that you’ll never get there, but every step in that direction will bring business benefits. One way I find helpful is to describe “perfection” as our “Ideal State”, most likely the condition we have captured in our vision. For each improvement, we identify a “Target State” –where we aim to get to with the improvement idea that we have at present. We work towards that target, which generates a result. Then we look for the next improvement and so on as we get ever closer
Making improvement habitual
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” Adapted from Aristotle
For continuous improvement to really become self–sustaining and part of “how we do things round here”, it must become a habitual part of the day–to–day routine rather than something that requires extra effort. Something that becomes almost automatic. Forming new habits is hard! However, most of us will know from personal experience that forming new habits is hard, even when it’s something that we want to do. As I mentioned earlier, we discover that we are actually into a process of “rewiring” our brain – forming new neural networks. To adopt new beliefs and new ways of thinking requires conscious effort for some time before the new neural networks are established and the old ones weakened. During this transition period, which lasts for a lot longer than most of us would like to think, it’s very easy to slip back into old ways of doing things. Now imagine doing the same task when you’re a leader trying to encourage new ways of working in others. Unless they adopt the underlying beliefs to drive their thinking and then their actions, they may go along for a while when their manager is encouraging them to do so, but they really aren’t fully engaged with the process. We often talk about people’s resistance to change, as if it’s inevitable. However, I prefer the idea that people are resistant to the way we try to change them! If we lower the “barriers to change” by involving them and providing an environment where they can engage more readily with the new ideas, we have a better chance that they’ll put the effort in to rewire their brains too!
Dealing with doubt
Of course, many people will not readily adopt these ideas. They will have lots of concerns, doubts, objections and so on. However much you may convinced about the new ways and believe these are unfounded, they are very real to those concerned. Therefore it’s an important part of the change process for leaders to take time to listen to the concerns and engage with them, helping their colleagues work through them in a positive manner using a supportive, coaching style while being very firm about the necessity of the change.
Acting your way into a new way of thinking
I love this idea from John Shook, one of the first US managers to be trained by Toyota in Japan and now head of the Lean Enterprise Institute, that we can “act our way into a new way of thinking.” In other words, despite our doubts about these new ideas, we put conscious effort into practising them until we can see their validity and are able to incorporate these new ideas into our way of thinking, a core principle of continuous improvement. Once we accept them, we are well on the way to forming a habit. With that idea in mind, what is it that leaders need to do to make it easy for people to work on adopting the new ways of thinking and doing so that their beliefs about them change? This requires two elements – creating the right organisation climate and establishing a set of rhythms and routines that makes identifying and acting on problems and improvement opportunities as easy as possible, thereby embedding continuous improvement into the organizational culture.
Continuous Improvement – Creating the right climate
I’ve talked in previous articles about leaders creating the right climate for people to be willing to “have a go” at new things:
- Creating a psychologically safe space where talking about problems, mistakes and different ideas is received positively and is rewarded.
- Establishing an expectation that everyone will bring problems and opportunities to the surface.
- Leading by example, managers and senior leaders model applying problem solving and making improvements in their own roles. We are seeking to “disturb” people’s underlying assumptions about how things are in the organisation and get them to think more about the new ideas. Of course, if things have been very different in the past (and maybe are still not where you’d like them to be), it may take a while before people believe that these new ways are “real”. Actions must align with stated intent for some time before they are convinced, so be prepared for some scepticism and stick with it!
Establishing the right routines
The second key element is to make it easy to put the new ideas into practice by establishing routines of regular activity to work on problems and improvements. There are three components to this:
- A “capture system” for problems and ideas for improvement as part of the everyday rhythm of the operation.
- An “action system” where once problems and opportunities are logged, a known system for dealing with them that results in action is in place.
- A Prioritisation System to determine which issues get actioned first, as there is rarely enough capacity to work on all of them.
Speed is of the essence here. Not only does it mean that some benefits are delivered quickly, but it also reinforces the value of adopting the new ways of working and helps with the assimilation of the ideas into everyone’s belief system to make the changes sustainable. As people solve more problems and take action on improvements, both competence, enthusiasm, and belief will grow. Performance will improve and will require less effort, a virtuous cycle to deliver exceptional performance with ease.
That’s all very well in theory, but . . . . .
If you’re still thinking that this sounds very nice in theory, but that it will never work out in practice, and you have lots of examples to convince yourself of that, please take some encouragement from my 30+ years of applying and refining this approach in my corporate and consulting career. My own experience early in my days in production control. Over a nine-month period we moved from being a chaotic group of four working flat out firefighting the supply of parts to Land Rover to having one person in the team taking 2–3 hours a day to achieve a far better result and the rest of us focusing on more strategic work, such as changing our processes to avoid a repeat of that scenario on future new vehicle launches, or moving on to more satisfying roles, all thanks to continuous improvement. A hospital booking team, led by a manager approaching burnout, battling to book patient appointments for surgery etc. disappointing many while leaving valuable theatre time unfilled. Over 12 weeks, adopting simple daily disciplines and problem-solving, theatre utilisation went up, patients were far happier and the team’s life was far more relaxed. Even more satisfying was the transformation in the team’s manager, which led a colleague to ask, “What have you done to [XXXXX], she’s like a new woman!” In both cases, we had other teams coming to ask us how we did it, as they wanted that sort of result for themselves – exceptional performance with ease, clearly seeing the value of continuous improvement.
Continuous Improvement – In summary
So, in summary, for continuous improvement to move from an optional extra that requires additional effort to an essential and habitual process that is a natural part of everyday life, we have to encourage everyone involved to make a conscious effort to integrate the new thinking.
“We cannot become what we want to be by remaining what we are.” Max DePree
As leaders, we can encourage this process:
- Casting a clear vision about the need for CI – the “pursuit of perfection” – to improve the performance of the business and the reality of the threat to the organisation if it doesn’t adapt to changes in its internal and external environment.
- Embedding CI in everyone’s role.
- Creating the right working climate and supporting leadership behaviours for problems and ideas to be shared.
- Engaging with everyone’s concerns in an empathetic and supportive way.
- Establishing routines and practices to help improvement activity to become habitual.
- Sharing successes to create a track record of routinely improving work.
If the above has led you to conclude that you need to take action, we’d love to encourage you on that journey. I know from my own journey how valuable it is to have an experienced “guide” to help me through changes, so do get in touch for a no cost, no obligation chat.
Harvey Leach is passionate about helping organizations acquire the knowledge, skill, and culture they need to achieve Operational Excellence. Following a successful career in the automotive industry with Rover and BMW Group, where he worked in a variety of roles covering R&D, production and corporate strategy, Harvey has worked as a consultant, trainer, and coach since 2004. He delights in seeing teams “come alive” as they discover how they can apply the same principles that underpin some of the world’s leading companies to their organization to achieve impressive improvements in performance and more fulfilling lives.
