CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT: The Ripple Effect

Harry and Steph are chatting over coffee Monday morning, each sharing their woes for the week ahead. As friends, they know they can trust that their conversation goes no further than the tea room. Having listened to his friend talk about her ‘ogre’ of a boss and all the stress he is piling on her, Harry is observed by his own leader as being standoffish towards said ogre-boss in a project meeting on Wednesday. Upon some investigation, Harry’s manager finds that Mary has overheard Harry in the tea room speaking negatively about ogre-boss, and by Friday Harry finds himself in a one-on-one discussion about his performance on the project.

Every action creates some sort of reaction. Whether we realise it or not, we have the ability to create ‘ripple effects’. A ripple effect is a situation in which ripples expand across the water when an object is dropped into it. Each ripple affects the initial state of the water and can be followed outwards incrementally. And while Steph could not foresee the impact her ripples created for Harry (or his for himself), if we steer our own energy towards business improvement; through small change, we can have big impact.

CHAPTER PROGRESS •

Chapter Introduction

BY THE END OF THIS CHAPTER YOU WILL BE ABLE TO:Implement inclusive systems for continuous improvementActively encourage and support team participation in decision making processesCommunicate and gather feedback on the processes for continuous improvementMentor and coach teams to implement continuous improvement processesBuild a culture of continuous improvement

Chapter Introduction

Chapter #1 | Developing systems for continuous improvement

An Evolutionary Process

In a business sense, continuous improvement is often referred to as ‘kaizen’; meaning change (kai) for the good (zen). Based on the belief that everything can be improved, organisations that take this approach take problems and challenges and use them as opportunities to improve their processes. They also look at processes that assume everything is ‘fine’ and use them as opportunities to improve, rather than being happy to just accept the status quo. Instead, what you find is small, sometimes imperceptible changes that add up to substantial changes over time. In this way, continuous improvement is much more progressive, cumulative, adaptive, employee-friendly and actionable than large innovative change. Let’s take a look at the difference between an innovative and continuous improvement solution.

CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT: The Ripple Effect

Innovation comes in all shapes and sizes and continuous improvement is one small portion of that much larger picture. While innovation may be seen as ‘new’ or ‘revolutionary’, continuous improvement is more about building upon existing processes with small, consistent changes that are more ‘evolutionary’, but no less powerful to your organisation. While your business may not always be in the position to create large, disruptive change, it is likely to always be able to take advantage of more subtle ongoing improvements. The key is to be open to the opportunities! Whether you realise it or not, seemingly inconsequential actions can have drastic long-term results – so why not plan for them strategically?

A CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT SOLUTION

You own an optics store where you employ both Opticians, as well as retail staff to dispense customer frame and lens orders. You have been getting a lot of complaints about customers having trouble with their lenses when they come to pick them up. Depending on the experience of those who measured the customer up for their new frames and lenses, you either get more or less errors on customer pick up.  How might you solve this?

AN INNOVATIVE SOLUTION

WHICH CAUSES

an issue with cell phone signals and his calls to drop out

the monkey sneeze and screech

a herd of gazelles into a stampede

WHICH MAKES

WHICH STARTLES

lands on a monkey’s nose, flapping its wings.

a nearby dam to break, sending excess moisture into the air

A BUTTERFLY

a powerful storm in the upper atmosphere

In his Emmy Award winning comedy show, Dennis Miller Live, Dennis Miller touches on just how strong the ripple effect can be in this tongue-in-cheek example. In it, he blames his cell phone reception issues directly on one butterfly. Confused yet? Take a look for yourself.

Kaizen, or continuous improvement, has benefits across all aspects of your business including productivity, effectiveness, safety, waste reduction and service, just to name a few. Basically, wherever a process exists, so too does the opportunity for improvement within that process. Just as a butterfly can cause a mobile phone connection to drop out, these outcomes of continuous improvement processes can be seen in your business:Customer satisfaction due to higher quality products with fewer faultsTeamwork and problem solving skills involvement through working together on solutions and process improvements strengthening teamsEmployee satisfaction through things being done ‘better’Employee commitment and retention through a greater sense of involvementSustainable business advantage through increases in efficiency, lower costs and higher quality productsRemoves waste and unnecessary activities through employee skills and efficiencies improveOverall business growth through a focus on quality and efficiency

Finding Your Focus

Are you doing things because it’s the way they’ve always been done? Check out the ‘Five Monkeys’ experiment to see how easy it is to create a culture focused on status quo over continuous improvement.

EXPLORE MORE

The first step to continuous improvement is to focus on your processes. Remember every challenge is a process that can be improved. And every process is a process that can be improved. Your aim is to identify any steps that are either unnecessary that can be eliminated (time saver!) or that are potential opportunities for small change. Start by mapping out your processes and asking questions like:What’s working?What’s not working well?Where can it be improved?Is this step important? What value does it add?Who says this step needs to be this way? Why?Have things changed?As you go through this process of questioning, you may find that you come up with answers like, “It’s the way we’ve always done it,” or “I don’t know why we do it like that,” or, “I think so and so uses it for something.” None of these statements is absolute enough to assess the validity or requirement of that step. Involve as many people as you need to in the process to check if each step is actually important. Ask, and you might find out it’s not necessary. The aim is to avoid any assumptions; particularly the assumption that ‘someone else’ knows why.

Now that you know the steps that are necessary, you can start to identify if there are opportunities for small ‘wins’ to improve them. Here’s where it’s time to focus on how easy (or not) things are for people. And the only way for you to do that is by involving them in the process of decision making. Who best to tell you if something works or doesn’t? Each team member should feel supported and encouraged to take responsibility and exercise initiative in the processes that they follow every day. Often, the best improvements come from the small frustrations that sit around our daily activities. Often, these frustrations are guided by policies and procedures that are either out of date, developed by people who do not actually understand the task, or have not been adjusted based on team feedback after carrying them out. Here’s a simple example. You walk up to a door that instructs you to ‘push’, grab the handle and pull it towards you, only to realise when the door resists, that there is a sign on the door instructing you to push it to open. Happened to you? So, how could we make this process easier? Perhaps we could put up a bigger sign? Wouldn’t a more simple, practical idea be to remove the handle? To make it easy for people to do things, talk to them about the most natural way they would generally be done. If a door has no handle, naturally you’re going to be inclined to push it.

Take a look at what it feels like to do something that doesn’t feel natural to you.

CI Systems

This is the core of any continuous improvement process. The challenge is to remain open to the possibilities. When you’re busy being busy it can be hard to imagine, let alone make the time to look for opportunities to improve. Set aside some regular time to focus on your work and priorities so that you can assess whether you’re doing the work in the best way possible. You can use online and offline tools to help you to map out how you spend your day and provide you with some perspective on where your time may be wasted.

Review

Look for a better way

Now that you know the cycle of continuous improvement, here are a few tips on how to implement systems and processes into your business to make it work.

Play detective

Hold an event

Where? Place

Why is it done? Why do it? Why do it there? Why do it then? Why do it that way?

What to do? What is being done? What should be done? What else can be done? What else should be done?

When? Sequence / Timing

How to do it? How is it done? How should it be done? How can this method be used in other areas? How else can we do it? Is there another way?

Where to do it? Where is it done? Where should it be done? Where else can it be done? Where else should it be done?

Why? Reason

Who? People

How? Method

What? Purpose

When to do it? When is it done? When should it be done? When else can it be done? When else should it be done?

Use your team to gain valuable insight by asking for constructive criticism and feedback. Often others can provide you with tweaks or changes based on a fresh, objective view of your activities or their own, which can save time and energy for everyone. Remember, ‘the way we’ve always done things’ is exactly the reason you may need to do a little digging into why. To help, you might use a questioning tool such as the ‘5W and 1H of Kaizen’.

5Ws and 1H of Kaizen

Who does it? Who is doing it? Who should be doing it? Who else can do it? Who else should do it?

Many companies have started to hold set kaizen events; often known as a ‘just-in-time’ process improvement. The aim is to use these events to bring together a team of committed team members for consensus on changes and their benefit, with the results implemented before the conclusion of the event. Quality circles are another great example of continuous improvement events that you can run. This involves employees from small groups meeting regularly to address issues of product or service quality, operations, workflows, rates of output and material purchase and storage. The group then develops a report summarising any problems, why they chose to focus on them, how they went about analysing it and recommendations for actions, including targets, timelines and expected benefits (monitored through PDCA techniques).

When was the last time you looked back on something and thought about what you did, what went well, what didn’t and what you would do differently next time? Have a reflections and review meeting after every project, rollout or milestone has been completed. To enable and support everyone’s involvement, think about techniques to allow for these discussions to be as honest and open as possible. Team members need to feel like they are ‘safe’ to give their real feedback. Miss this step and you might find your review meetings becoming more like lip service than a forum for real improvement. Reflection and review is important. Remember, hindsight is 20:20. To run a review meeting ask:What did we set out to do? What was our goal?What actually happened?What worked well?What could have worked better?What will we do next time?

Busy being busy

So you want to implement continuous improvement in your business or within your work team. You’ve recognised the benefits and can already see some systems that would work well within your team. Believe it or not, many organisations – even with the best of intentions – fail to truly implement continuous improvement in their business.  So, let’s take a look at some of the factors that might get in the way.

It’s being done for the wrong reasons

Not understanding what it really is

It’s easy not to do

The set-up is all wrong

The culture gets in the way

It’s treated as a one-off

Conflicting priorities

Roadblocks to Avoid

You start the process of seeking out a technological solution, whereby a computer takes the measurements for you to minimise the opportunity for human error. This process takes two years and a lot of training and dollars to fully integrate into your business.

You review the dispensing process and roster the more experienced team members into measuring up frames and lenses, with less experienced team members performing other important activities on the shopfloor, such as fashion frame styling, processing orders, checking customers in and managing stock. This process takes one week to implement and starts to decrease the issues almost straight away. You also re-look at the training for new team members and make changes to what tasks can be performed when, further improving the experience and the onboarding of new hires down the track. Still not sure that small things can make a big difference? Let’s explore this a little more.

It’s easy not to do As is the case with most things that are easy to do; it’s just as easy not to do it. While some continuous improvement systems are harder to integrate into your business, often it can be as simple as remaining open to the opportunity that can make all the difference. Don’t wait until you’re forced to make change – be on the lookout for better ways of working. Not only will you develop new skills, accomplish goals and increase your individual and team value, time and energy can also be saved in the process.

Conflicting priorities  Systems for continuous improvement can often involve an investment in time and money that organisation’s would rather place elsewhere – especially if your business is underperforming. With so much else to worry about, continuous improvement is very likely not the priority. Unfortunately, it is usually when you don’t feel like you have the time or money to invest in improving your business practices that you probably need it the most.

The set-up is all wrong  Real continuous improvement isn’t something you can do to your team; it’s something you need to do with them. If your continuous improvement systems have been set up without any team feedback or consultation you might find that the system designed to improve your processes has its own issues. Quick wins are great and probably likely, but sustainable continuous improvement practices comes from the culture. Everyone needs to understand and own their role in the improvement process – and be happy to take it on.

Busy being busy Many continuous improvement practices require you to take time away from your work so you can think about how to do things better, for example, a lessons learned meeting post project completion. It’s also important to keep the basic principles in mind while you work; take note for example of the activities that are harder to do or take a lot of time. However, all of this tends to become theoretical in the face of actually ‘being’ busy. Don’t allow yourself or your team to get so absorbed in the job they actually miss something important or shy away from speaking up when they have an idea to offer. Spending time in meetings without any outcomes or writing reports no one reads are great examples of wasted time you could get back if you step back and look at them objectively.

The culture gets in the way  Remember the five monkeys? Whether we realise it or not, our culture can hinder as much as it can help our ability to move towards an ongoing commitment to continuous improvement. Cultures that allow teams to question and challenge the status quo thrive; they are never simply ‘satisfied’ with the way they do things. Conversely, where there is a lack of support or commitment from leaders, the business culture will struggle to support continuous improvement ideas.

It’s being done for the wrong reasons  A practice of continuous improvement cannot thrive if its goal is simply about downsizing a team. How is a team expected to support such a practice if the impact could potentially cost them their job? Even if this specific goal is not spoken, the resulting actions make them obvious to teams and inevitably lead to bigger challenges with motivation and retention of employees who may never have been on the chopping block themselves.

It’s treated as a one-off  Often continuous improvement initiatives are seen as temporary or something good for a specific outcome. In this case they are often let go as quickly as they were introduced. Or they are seen as necessary only where there is an obvious issue to resolve. Real continuous improvement is not a one-off, it is a way of working that becomes embedded into your culture.

Not understanding what it really is  To achieve the real benefits of continuous improvement, you need to take deliberate action. Companies who assume that continuous improvement happens simply because they accept changes as they occur are missing the point. Rather than waiting for the inevitable change that happens, true continuous improvement seeks it out and demands it – little by little.

DO BETTER, NOT MORE   Embracing Kaizen or continuous improvement means supporting a philosophy that rewards teams for doing better work, not just more work. The saying ‘work smarter, not harder’ resonates with continuous improvement practices. This means supporting your team to make smart decisions about how they choose to work, not just doing things because they are a standard way of being done. Team members should be able to make decisions based on an assessment and understanding of the reality of their situation, find a better way to then address it and act on it. Teach your team to look for and act on some of the following:Patterns in the task being done and ways to exploit themThings that can be automated or routinised and automate or routinise themWays to eliminate or make more efficient things that are done frequently or take a lot of timePersonal limitations and ways to improve or work around themPersonal strengths and how to play to themMoments that cause frustration or noticeably take a long time. See if there is a better way to do what they’re doingPeople who waste their time or cause them stress and figure out ways to avoid or work better with themTeam up with people who complement them or work alone depending on what is most effectiveRecognise when they need breaks and go for short walks or just just take a break to re-energise and refocus

Building a Culture of Improvement

In a time where the general rule in production was ‘no matter what, don’t stop the line’, Toyota broke the mould. Not only did they ‘stop the line’ when they needed to, they did so at the request of their production line workers – and rewarded them for it! Their methods provided them with a high production volume, but also very little waste and very few errors, in contradiction to many of their counterparts. Check out more on Kaizen and how Toyota has made it a core part of their business principles in this article.

If your team’s planning is only taking a long time because people are afraid to fail, is it really the best use of their time? To reap the rewards of continuous improvement you have to let your team make mistakes, so they’re not afraid to take action. Check out Wujec’s Ted Talk here on how important it is to work together and learn from your mistakes as you work towards a true continuous improvement culture.

Checkpoint

So what now? We recommend you put into practice some of the new skills, techniques and principles you’ve just learned. This is the best way we know, to ensure you know what you need to be successful on your journey – know what we mean? Now, let’s get into the next chapter!

EXPLORE MORE: How can you build a culture of continuous improvement when we live in an age of disruption? Find out in this Deloitte paper here.

Congrats on getting through your unit to this point! So what have you done in this chapter? Well, you’ve:Looked at how to implement inclusive systems for continuous improvementRecognised how to actively encourage and support team participation in decision making processesLooked at how to communicate and gather feedback on continuous improvement processesIdentified what to coach teams on to implement continuous improvement processesLooked at what makes a culture of continuous improvement

Check out more on Toyota’s production system here

Continuous improvement is all about change – but it’s not change for the sake of change. It’s deliberate, constant improvement. A continuous improvement focus is not just a productivity system, more a way your team works together; a way of ‘being’. A true continuous improvement focus means striving to do what you do better, all the time. In focusing on continuous improvement however, it’s also important to maintain respect for the product and the people involved. There’s no point in implementing improvements in one area, that simultaneously create issues in another. So, what does continuous improvement focus look like?

As a process, continuous improvement is an ongoing cycle of action, review, evaluation and modification. Wujec identifies this as one of the other critical factors within business – the power of prototyping. Less talk, more action. Less jockeying for positional power, more trial and error. Less planning for the perfect outcome, more learning from your mistakes. Probably the most important things to remember when you start thinking about implementing a continuous improvement focus is that the process is cyclical, measurable, incremental and involves everyone.

MonitorMeasure & recordStudy the actual resultsCompare against expected results

Implement the planExecute the processTrainingCommunication

Whether you realise it or not, you make small improvements to your processes all the time. For example, you may cook a new meal for the first time, following a set recipe. When you serve up your dinner and taste it, you realise it needs a little more salt. Adding salt is a small improvement to make the meal more to your liking. But what about the next time you cook the same dish? Perhaps you’ll make a note to add more salt in the cooking process so that the system as a whole becomes more efficient in achieving your desired outcome of a tasty meal. A continuous improvement system is any system that supports in making constant enhancements. How can you make things a little bit better? What ‘tweaks’ can be made to improve things? How can we do things easier, faster or cheaper? A system often used in support of continuous improvement is the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle. The ‘Plan’ step involves identifying a goal or purpose, formulating a theory, setting a standard or policy, defining success metrics and putting a plan into action. These activities are followed by the ‘Do’ step, in which the components of the plan are implemented. After implementing the plan, you then get to the ‘Check’ step, where outcomes are monitored to test the validity of the plan for signs of progress and success, or problems and areas for improvement. The ‘Act’ step closes the cycle, integrating and implementing the learning generated by the entire process, which can be used to adjust the goal or change methods or processes. These four steps are repeated over and over as part of a never-ending cycle of continual improvement.

Establish objectives & targetsPlan processesSet policies

Analyse the differencesTake corrective actionContinuous improvement

Systems to identify and analyse a problem:

Systems to analyse and resolve the problem:

Systems to assess and implement solutions:

get below the surface

seek answers

Each technique you might employ in your continuous improvement processes are designed to provide you with some variation of mathematical, statistical or visual analysis to achieve your desired improvement results. Here’s a little more about the tools you might implement to support your continuous improvement practices. You may choose to select from one or a range of the following options. Work with others to determine their merit before finalising your selection. It may help to try a few out and get feedback before implementing them as ongoing methods within your business.

take action

get a clear picture

Systems to identify problems or find your focus:

FLOW CHARTS Flow charts provide a pictorial representation of all the steps of a process or activity

BRAINSTORMING Brainstorming is a process for generating creative ideas and solutions through open group discussion. Every participant suggests as many ideas as possible for analysis and discussion

Use for process mappingAsk ‘why’ for each step of the process once mapping is completeCan also be used for analysis and solutions

Great forum for the end of a project or completion of a project to discuss ‘lessons learned’Encourage participation and an environment where no idea or thought is ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’Analyse, discuss or criticise ideas only when the brainstorming session is complete or you risk discouraging input

CONTROL CHARTS Control charts are graphs that can be used to assess how something has changed over time. They contain a central line to determine an ‘average’ and an upper and lower control limit based on historical data

PIE CHARTS Pie charts allow you to break down activities into percentages (to 100%), for example, the usage of a team’s time

NOMINAL GROUP TECHNIQUE The nominal group technique is a more controlled variation of brainstorming where each member of the group writes down their ideas to then be discussed and prioritised one by one by the group

Rather than use the data to target simple solutions like training or performance controls, ask what isn’t working in the existing process that is causing the variationsWhat is being done instead? Why is it being done that way? Is the current process too hard?

CHECK SHEETS Check sheets allow you to gather key observable data and isolate patterns. This is a great way of tracking trends in non-compliance and variation

Plot data in time orderProvides you with outcome comparisons to develop questions about why results were higher or lower than previousCan also be used to analyse and solve the problem

Systems to identify problems or find your focus: get a clear picture

Don’t guess – utilise team members directly involved in activities being mappedIf there are unaccounted for slices of the pie, use this ‘unknown’ space as an area of focus

Use for problem solving to encourage creative thinking without interactionUse in the idea-generation stagesUse to avoid ‘groupthink’ in decision making

Plot observed values and the times they were observed along the timelineUse to identify patterns and trends over time

STRATIFICATION CHARTS Stratification charts are used to separate and plot data specific to various categories, for example different product lines or customer groups. The chart can be used to diagnose a problem and identify which categories contribute to the problem being solved

Start with cause and effect analysisIdentifies major causes and breaks them down into sub-causes

IS/IS NOT COMPARISON Complete an is/is not comparison by asking the question what ‘is’ and what ‘is not’ of the what, where, when, who, extent, frequency etc. of a problem

RUN CHARTS Run charts are line graphs of data plotted over time. Unlike a control chart they cannot tell you information on the stability of a process as they do not include control data

Prioritise or rank a range of items with different levels of significanceUse to separate the potential many causes from the critical few

Use for problem solving and analysisFind the root cause of an issue quicklyMay determine more than one solution, for example symptom and cause solutions may be made in the improvement process

THE FIVE ‘WHYs’ The ‘five whys’ involves asking the question of ‘why’ when a problem arises. Once the question is answered, another ‘why’ question is posed to address the previous answer. This continues until at least five levels of cause and effect for the problem are exposed, providing a more in-depth overview of what is happening and potential solutions.

PARETO CHARTS The Pareto principle states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. A Pareto chart is a bar graph that displays variances by the number of their occurrences. Displaying variances in descending order allows a view of the largest areas for improvement

Classify data into groups with commonalitiesShows relationships that might not otherwise be seenCombine with run charts to isolate problem areas

Systems to identify and analyse a problem: get below the surface

CAUSE AND EFFECT DIAGRAMS Also known as a fishbone or Ishikawa diagram (based on its inventor), cause and effect diagrams show the relationship of all factors (causes) that lead to the given situation (effects).

Write down what you know is part of the problem and what is not a part of the problemEstablishes points of comparisonLeads to a more complete description

HISTOGRAMS A histogram is a bar chart that displays the distribution of measurement data in graph form, showing the frequency with which these events occur

Shows relationships or correlations between variablesIdentifies impacts of change

Use to reveal the amount of variation in a processUseful in monitoring solutions not just finding problems

Systems to analyse and resolve the problem: seek answers

SCATTER DIAGRAMS A scatter diagram is a way of displaying what happens to one variable when you change another variable

FORCE FIELD ANALYSIS A force field analysis is a technique employed to identify and analyse the positive factors of a situation as driving forces and negative factors that might hinder as resisting forces

Develop actions to eliminate or move resisting forcesAssess the impact of resisting forces as critical or non critical to achieving objectives

Analyse the outcomes of actions through the process of continuous improvementAnalyse the variations to objectives

PDCA CYCLE The PDCA cycle can be used to move you from analysis to action, comparing the results of changes through the ongoing process of the cycle

Systems to assess and implement solutions: take action

So, whose job is continuous improvement in an organisation? In his Ted Talk, ‘Build a tower, build a team’, Tom Wujec highlights not only the process of continuous improvement in achieving goals, but also the power of teams working together to create process improvements. In fact, it is the diversity of the team involved that can help you to avoid any hidden assumptions about the effectiveness of your processes. Google employees famously used to spend 20% of their time looking for better ways to work, with the remaining 80% focused on doing their regular day-to-day roles. While this policy may have been reduced over time, it still lends itself to the concept of crafting a culture that welcomes the investment of its people and their time in continuous improvement, knowing that you will get the time back in better techniques and faster tools.

A system that supports teams to take the time, communicate with each other, make decisions and be accountable to their roles in continuous improvement, will yield the most successful outcomes. Meetings, forums, newsletters, policies, etc are all great mechanisms to utilise within your system for continuous improvement, but the real question is ‘how’ are these used? What do you do with the information as a result of them? Is communication really two-way? What happens when someone makes a mistake, or their leaders don’t like a suggestion? Just because the facility is there, doesn’t mean the company is actually listening; you need to assess the ‘what’ as well as the ‘how’ as part of your implementation plan. Leaders need to be able to lead the way, guiding a path to continuous improvement through their own focus, persistence, mentoring and coaching of their teams. Coach and mentor your team to:Share their ideas and opinions about what’s working and what isn’tBe adaptive and seek out opportunities to change and developTake risks and take action to learn from their successes and their failuresDrive the business vision using it as a guide to their decision makingWork together in support of better ways