The improvement industry has buried a simple idea under a landslide of vocabulary. Lean, Six Sigma, kaizen, DMAIC, value streams, belts in assorted colors. I hold the certifications, I respect the methods, and I will tell you plainly. The jargon is optional. The habits are not.
Strip everything away and continuous improvement is four sentences an eight-year-old could follow.
Notice problems on purpose. Most organizations only see problems large enough to force attention. Improving organizations hunt small ones deliberately, because small problems are cheap to fix and honest about where big ones will come from. A weekly fifteen-minute team question, “what was harder than it should have been?”, is a complete detection system.
Find the cause, not the culprit. When something goes wrong, ask what about how we work made that likely, and keep asking until the answer is a process, not a person. Blame ends learning instantly. Every time.
Change something small, soon. Not a committee, not an initiative, not a rollout. One team changes one thing this week and watches what happens. Small and reversible beats large and studied, because you learn from contact with reality instead of from projection.
Keep what works, on purpose. When the change helps, write the new way down, make it the standard, and tell the neighboring team. Improvements that live in one person’s habits leave in their resignation letter.
That is the entire discipline. The formal methods add power for complex problems, and there is a time for them. However, organizations fail at improvement not for lack of advanced technique. They fail for lack of the weekly habit. Start the habit. Add technique when the habit outgrows it.
Mel Meier, DBA is an applied social scientist and the founder of iB Consulting USA, a woman owned, WOSB certified advisory firm. She serves boards, associations, and executive teams through board advisory, organizational diagnostics, speaking engagements in the United States and internationally, and organizational assessments.
