Last week a colleague said to me “but Continuous Improvement is something that just happens, it can’t be
a process - can it?”
A few years ago, I heard a senior manager introduce himself as
“a person who has been continually
improving all his life”
Are both these
statements correct and what do they say about the connection between how people
and companies improve?
As human beings, we are always learning. Through our early
years, as we pass through various education systems, that learning has a
structure but our ability to learn and improve doesn’t finish when we leave
school. We continually add to our knowledge and abilities through various means
(new experiences, work courses, travel, reading, television, social media etc).
Unlike shool however, where knowledge was measured through course and exam
results, your post education improvements are those that you absorb through
time. Essentially this is your life experience.
Without doubt we are always improving, often in small
incremental steps, and to a degree this is also how many organisations improve.
Processes and systems are improved through the knowledge and experience of the
people who run them.
These improvements however are painfully slow and hard to
measure. Whilst companies continue to improve in this manner they face the
issue of falling behind the times and being overtaken by more progressive
start-up organisations.
Why is this?
Just like our early years, when our schooling focusses our
minds to improve our education and knowledge, new companies focus their
energies on being the best to give them an edge against established business in
their market.
So, do companies need
to go back to school?
The answer is that to accelerate improvements you do need to
have a structured approach. You can’t just rely on improvements by osmosis.
My previous blogs have talked about how to measure success,
the principles and skills needed to achieve continuous improvement and even a
simple project based approach to achieve CI. In what may be the last post in
this blog I give you a simple 10 step
process that can be implemented anywhere to give you or your business the
structure and impetus to continually improve.
The following link will take you to the Continual Improvement
Process:
Note you may need to open
in google Chrome to access downloadable material
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