I first became involved in continuous improvement around 30 years ago. Since then, I have seen countless methodologies, programmes and initiatives introduced with the promise of making businesses more efficient and productive.
Lean, Kaizen and continuous improvement are hardly new concepts. Businesses understand them, consultants teach them, governments support them, and manufacturers invest significant amounts of time and money implementing them.
Yet we still have a productivity problem.
That should make us ask a difficult question: if we have spent decades talking about continuous improvement, why haven’t we become consistently better at it?
There are some outstanding manufacturers that have embedded Lean successfully. We celebrate them, put them on pedestals and take groups of business leaders to see what they are doing.
There is value in seeing excellence first-hand. But the danger is believing that observing the finished product somehow provides the blueprint for recreating it elsewhere.
You can visit an exceptional factory on Friday, see its processes, hear about its culture and return to your own business on Monday full of enthusiasm. But you haven’t experienced the years of work, mistakes, leadership, discipline and behavioural change that created what you saw.
Continuous improvement cannot simply be copied.
I’ve been involved with Kaizen for longer than most people have been using the internet. Think about the difference between the two.
We don’t put businesses on pedestals because they use the internet particularly well. Nobody organises a coach trip to see a company because its employees successfully use email or cloud-based technology.
The internet has simply become part of the fabric of how we work and live.
After 40 years, why hasn’t continuous improvement done the same?
I believe part of the answer is that too many organisations still treat improvement as an initiative rather than an everyday way of operating.
A programme launches, people are trained, action plans are produced, and enthusiasm and momentum build.
Then priorities change, people move roles, actions slip and gradually the initiative loses momentum.
Sustainable improvement requires something much deeper. It requires visibility, accountability and leadership. People need to understand what is changing, why it is changing, who is responsible and whether those actions are actually delivering measurable improvements.
Technology can help provide that visibility, but technology alone isn’t the answer either. Ultimately, businesses need to create a culture where identifying problems, taking action, measuring results and improving again becomes routine.
The manufacturers we admire haven’t discovered a secret methodology unavailable to everyone else. What distinguishes many of them is their ability to sustain improvement year after year.
Perhaps, therefore, the productivity conversation needs to change.
Instead of continually asking businesses to start another improvement initiative, we should be asking a more fundamental question:
How do we make continuous improvement simply part of the way we do business?
