There are a lot of variations on a theme where someone asks an Internet forum how to quantify or justify the benefits of implementing a continuous improvement program.
If you think about it, though, this is really interesting question.
What are the benefits of NOT having continuous improvement? Why would managers deliberately decide not to have a learning organization, not to have continuous improvement, not to fully engage the intelligence of their workers?
Why would managers deliberately decide not to improve safety, quality, delivery, lead times?
What if we asked the question that way?
What is the benefit of not having these things?
If that question is subsequently dismissed as stupid (which I hope it would be), then the question is no longer whether they should be pursued, but how.
Mark,
I have never heard anyone say they are deliberately trying not to have continuous improvement.
I think a better question would be ‘Why do people not actively pursue continuous improvement?’
I’m interested in seeing where this topic goes. Might be a good idea for a Lean community A3 on the problem…
Hope all is well.
Jeff
Oh, I haven’t heard anyone say it either.
All I am trying to do is to challenge the “Why should we do it?” question with “Why shouldn’t we?”
What are the reasons we would NOT want to pursue these things?
That hopefully reverses the conversation because, at that point, there is no legitimate answer that makes sense.
“Why don’t people do it?” is, to me, too general.
I would have to ask “What is stopping us from doing it?” in a specific situation.
Good morning everybody,
well -I- have heard it a couple of times.
Every time, it was from managers that took 6Sigma as a synonym for “stability”.
Stability in itself was valued so high, that continuous improvement was considered a bad thing – since it brings instability.
Greetz from Germany!
-Martin
I think some managers and organizations view continuous improvement as an “additional thing” to do that takes away from what they believe is they should be doing.
One phrase I have heard is, “we are here to make parts, not to spend resources making changes.”
Our challenge is to make contiuous improvement be seen as part of the daily routine rather than an “additional” activity.
I would argue contiuous improvement’s whole purpose is to support the core business objectives. It’s hard to understand why some people or organizations can’t seem to understand the importance of that.
Mark,
Here’s 24 reasons… (I wrote an article about this topic about last summer.)
How to Overcome 24 Common Lean Excuses.
http://www.velaction.com/how-to-overcome-24-common-lean-excuses/
The key is to figure out what the obstacles are, and then tear down the obstacle.
Jeff
This topic isn’t really about excuses or how to overcome them.
It is about a higher level issue of justifying the pursuit of continuous improvement at all.
The counter-question is to ask how can we justify NOT pursuing these things?
Mark,
I think continuous improvement may have gotten a bad name at some places when one or more “improvements” didn’t work quite as planned. Now, one could logically argue that one doesn’t ever learn anything if everything goes exactly as planned. After all, if it did, we already knew the answer. But when something doesn’t go as planned and 1) A customer gets bad product, or 2) Somebody looks bad, strange things happen.
Let’s look at a customer getting bad product first. Now I could argue all day long that anybody experimenting with “improvements” should have adequate safeguards built into their system so as this would never be allowed to happen. But, I happen to be human and fully understand that mistakes happen. But the opportunity here is to continuously improve your process while maintaining or improving your quality. So, adequate safeguards need to be built into any experiment involving production processes.
As for somebody looking bad, that’s a bit more touchy. Nobody likes to look bad – especially in public. And, the further up the food chain the person is that looks bad, the weirder things get. But if you tackle the first problem correctly, the second one becomes almost a non-issue.
My caution is that in some places I’ve worked with, the result of one or both of the above situations were various measures intended to “control” change. Yes, putting things in place to prevent problems from reaching customers would be desirable. But, in almost every case I’ve seen, these “change control” measures turned into “change prevention” measures. That would be bad – very bad.
So one reason not to try to learn or improve would be fear of making mistakes?
Does it follow that the status-quo is adequate, or “as good as it gets?”
As silly as that sounds, I’ve run into it – more than once. Remember, if the environment you’re brought up in rewards only successes and punishes failures, you’re going to get the behavior you incent. BTW, this also leads to folks calling things successful that actually were not. As I said, bad – very bad.
But I still think that abstractly most people, even the most reticent managers, would likely agree that continuous improvement is a good thing to do, and that learning organizations are good things to have.
I totally agree with you there Mark. But where life gets interesting for us is when somebody says one thing, but doesn’t walk the walk. It’s kind of like General George Patton asking for open & honest feedback on whatever orders he just gave to his troops. Think anybody would dare to say anything? Nah.
So one step at a time.
Where this started was “How can I justify doing continuous improvement?”
and my response is “How can we justify NOT doing it?”
Simple: by using a short payback period as criterion.
And yes I know most improvements would be small requiring little investment, but getting an organization to start pursuing and implementing these small ideas takes time & effort.
But it’s a great question to get leaders thinking, thanks Mark.
BTW, I believe you’re in the Netherlands somewhere this month, correct?
Regards, Rob