Difficulty is not the initiator of Continuous Improvement change: it is a test that it is already trusted
From the day I started working as a Continuous Improvement practitioner I became indoctrinated.
The paradigm has been, for a Continuous Improvement culture to take hold there needs to be a dire organisational reason for this to happen. Normally this is interpreted as a financial difficulty, an oft cited example is Toyota with the difficulties Japanese industry had after WWII. It doesn’t need to be financial, BP realigned itself after the Texas City explosion taking on its Operating Management System which included Continuous Improvement and having as a central part of its culture transformation after Macondo. Even now in the Covid 19 related oil price crash BP has once again turned to a CI discipline: Agile.
But these cases are rare, an often quoted statistic is that 70% of change initiatives fail, a somewhat problematic quote, as it doesn’t have an empirical basis nor does it properly define success and, therefore, failure. Many people also quote change is hard, what is hard is getting everyone to agree on what the objectives are and that they are worth pushing for. This is why the message needs to be compelling, transparent and readily relatable, hence the need for a perceived “change or collapse” situation. This phrase is evocative and means doing something radical, out of the ordinary and risky because the alternative is way worse. The problem with this is established businesses are inherently conservative, all the measures of businesses are stacked to assure stability; keep going the same way that you have done to achieve success to date. Often change in business comes from start-ups, with larger firms staying relevant by buying proven start-ups and subsuming them into their own established culture.
Clearly there has been change in organisations, and in some pretty well established organisations, AstraZeneca, the pharmaceuticals company, are going through it at the moment with their dynamic COO, Pam Cheng, kicking-off a Lean transformation that they believe has contributed to its growth.
Does an organisation need to have a “change or collapse” situation? AstraZeneca wasn’t in trouble when it started its Lean journey it had a vision. Givaudan was not in trouble when it established its CI Centre of Excellence it was outperforming its competitors, a leader in its field*, by a long stretch. But as its competition performs as they have done Givaudan has more than doubled is share price, even during the global pandemic.
We have seen other companies and organisations have also taken on CI, or Lean, or Six-Sigma, and now Agile-Scrum/Agile Project Management but as soon as the going got tough, these programmes, rather than be, as CI logic might dictate, the survival mechanism were seen as extraneous. As I said business is inherently conservative. When the going gets tough the tough batten down the hatches and go back to what they know.
Where does that leave CI and “change or collapse”, if continuous improvement transformation is to succeed it needs to prove itself in the easy times to the people who will be in the driving seat when the difficult times come. It could be that, in the case of Pam Cheng, it is proved in a company they worked for previously, or in the case of BP proved to a cohort of managers who were destined to become EVPs.
Do we throw out the book? In my opinion, no. The sense of urgency (in John Kotter’s terms) is still essential, but it needs to come way before the hatches are locked, it needs to come when leaders are comfortable with trying something new, and this is when times are good. There will always be something that the leader is worried about, you can use this if you are a CI manager or a CI consultant to start your first conversation with a leader: “What is keeping you up at night?”. Make sure you have walked in to that discussion with a blank charter or business case template, let them talk, and take notes on the form, this will help you form questions to flesh out the problem. Sometimes this is enough; using IT terms, our minds think in parallel, which means everything feels jumbled up, our mouths work in serial, meaning to get our thoughts into speech they need to be put into order, sometimes this is enough, and why talking therapy is often so helpful.
If it isn’t immediately apparent how to solve the issue, your questions to coax out a good problem statement might be, and this feeds into Systems Thinking. In Systems Thinking there are two types of issue, a mess and a problem, the only difference are their boundaries. Boundaries are elements that hem the problem in, examples are the amount of time to solve the issue, the impact of the issue, which areas the issue affects, the risk the issue poses. The most difficult issues are the ones where one or more of these boundaries are unknown; messes. The technique is to find the boundaries, and by doing so change messes into problems; much easier to solve. Sometimes a boundary doesn’t naturally exist, so putting an artificial one in place can be enough to change a mess into a problem, and therefore a possible solution is conceivable.
So, by framing the conversation properly and by formulating a good problem statement, you can walk out of the meeting with the leader in a better frame of mind, you will have made that first step in building rapport and to them being a good improvement sponsor; now you need to deliver.
The more that CI is seen to deliver the more it will be trusted as a methodology, and then you can begin to have the conversations about culture change and gearing up CI culture. It sounds simple, it isn’t; some managers will take longer to build the rapport with than others and some you just won’t be able to build a strong enough rapport with at all, but the more success you have the more influencers you will have and so the burden of proof that CI works will not just rest with you.
The test will come when the hard times hit. The hard times will come, but if the ground work has been done well you will have become the trusted advisor to the senior leaders. As a trusted advisor you will be in the position to help them through, and by extension CI will be seen as essential to get the organisation through the difficulty.
Darren Clyde has spent 15 years working with organisations and teams to reduce cost and effort of doing business. He has managed CI programmes in various organisations around the globe.
*Based on share price
