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CHAPTER TWO: COMMITMENT TO CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT

from
When "Good Enough" Isn't Good Enough,
Core Ideas of Total Quality
© by Ends of the Earth Learning Group 1998

by
Linda Turner and Ron Turner

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven References and Copying Rights


Committing to continuous improvement sounds totally innocent on the surface. In fact, one's first instinct is to say, "Well of course, it makes perfect sense. How could anyone oppose it?" Everyone claims they want to get better and better.

Most people, however, tend to use at least some of the following cliches. As you read them, consider what message they are telling about attempts to improve things.

"If it ain't broke, why fix it?"

"Are you saying there's something wrong with what we're doing?

"I've been doing it this way for twenty years and never got any complaints before."

"There's only one way to do a job:

the right way."

"Why re-invent the wheel?"

"We're already the best."

"Why bother?"

"We did it this way twenty years ago, and it didn't work then."

"Good enough!"

"This ain't no piano we're making."
(Quoted by a group of carpenters constructing a nuclear power plant.)

DO YOU WAIT FOR SOMETHING TO BREAK BEFORE THINKING ABOUT HOW TO IMPROVE THINGS?
The above cliches come from a "good enough/not good enough" attitude in which individuals assume things should be left alone as long as they are "good enough." In other words, continuous improvement is not sought. Instead, improvement is sought only when performance falls below some threshold.

Continuous improvement means that goals should not be anything less than perfection. Since it is impossible to be perfect, that means there will always be room for improvement regardless of how good processes get.

When "good enough" attitudes are prevailing, then goal setting shoots for something "reasonable." This leads to a "target trap." People start working for the minimum, rather than working on continuous improvement.

STOP KICKING YOURSELF FOR NOT BEING PERFECT!
W. Edwards Deming warned that Management by Objective (MBO) is the opposite of committing to continuous improvement and should be discarded. Instead, people should stop kicking themselves for being less than perfect, and instead accept the need for lifetime improvement.

Commitment to continuous improvement cannot be an empty commitment. It means the organization is dedicating 5% to 10% of its time and resources to improvement efforts such as training, meeting time, development of feedback loops, etc. This is a far greater commitment than most organizations are ready to adopt.

YOU HAVE TO TAKE THE TIME OUT OF PRODUCTION IN ORDER TO COMMIT TO CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT.
When General Motors first sent executives to Toyota in the 1980s in order to determine why their work force seemed to be more efficient, the GM executives were shocked to discover assembly lines were shut down for two hours per week so that workers could meet and talk about improving their processes. "How can you afford this?" was the "common sense" question of GM managers. "How can you afford not to do this?" was the Total Quality response. Committing to continuous improvement is how Toyota overcame General Motors and shot by it.

Educators who commit to continuous improvement will spend five minutes out of every hour in order to get feedback and ideas for improving classes. This means less lecture time, but in the long run it will mean more effective lectures.

Teams will similarly commit time out of every meeting for examining their team processes. Commitment to continuous improvement should permeate every activity by every individual within the organization. Nothing should be considered sacred and immune from review.

Many people resist giving up work time for process improvement. Like the GM visitors to Toyota, they see the 5% to 10% time commitment as a cost and not an investment. In the long run, those individuals and organizations that do commit to continuous improvement will become far more efficient and will get more done. Those who don't commit will stand still and live with a status quo that never gets better.

Experimentation is part of any Total Quality organization. Necessarily, with experimentation, there will be a need for good data collection in order to document if changes made things better or worse. This means replacing guesswork with hard facts. Assertions and assumptions have to start being questioned without people becoming defensive and emotional in response.

START BY DRIVING OUT FEAR!
Unfortunately good data is sometimes threatening to people. Fear can immobilize attempts to define processes and develop improvements. The need to drive out fear is so critical that W. Edwards Deming suggested that the first step in adopting a Total Quality focus is to attack the fear factor. Who wants to be a messenger where messengers are blamed for "bad" results? Who would be willing to admit an experiment didn't work if they expected negative consequences as a result? Where fear exists, leaders will not have an accurate sense of what is really happening because no will dare share bad news. That means the organization must focus on raising underlying fears and concerns of organization members, and then address openly these concerns and fears.

The work environment itself needs to not only drive out fear, but to replace a culture of "control" with one of "learning." "Common sense" to traditional managers means the top of the organization must control everything happening at the bottom. This control mentality leads to red tape and rules that limits learning so that only the top managers learn and no one else.

A LEARNING ENVIRONMENT ENCOURAGES PEOPLE TO LEARN FROM THEIR MISTAKES.
In Total Quality organizations the pace of continuous improvement needs to be accelerated by making it possible for everyone in the organization to be in a learning mode. That means the top must give up its controlling mindset and let good things happen. The job of management changes from being one in charge of everything to being one which creates a learning environment which has six key characteristics.


1. TRUST: There must be trust both of management and peers. This means the organization must commit its energies to driving out fear and changing behaviors which cause fear to rise. This usually will require management to promise that improvement will not result in someone losing their job.

For managers on teams, there must be a role shift that puts them in a peer relationship in which their opinions are accepted not through fear, but rather only when the rest of the team agrees that the opinions are best. Continuous improvement will not take place if individuals fear the consequences of contradicting the boss or contradicting any of their peers.

2. PEOPLE MUST BELIEVE IN THE FUTURE. People must believe they will have a job beyond next week. If there is no belief in the future, then individuals will be spending their energies looking for another job instead of being focused on the continuous improvement efforts of the organization.

3. RESPECT AND DIGNITY. Individuals must learn how to truly listen to one another with empathy. No yelling or "running down" of people should be permitted by either supervisors or peers. People need to respect the feelings and beliefs of others even when they disagree with those feelings and beliefs.

4. THE POWER TO CHANGE THINGS. People must be given the tools and authority to actually change things. Nothing demoralizes people more than to ask them to improve things without also giving them the means for living up to that responsibility.

The fastest way to kill input is for management to summarily reject recommendations from its process improvement teams or individuals working on improvement projects.

5. TEAM APPROACH. Egos must be put aside. People must start to recognize that system improvements are due to joint efforts and not individual efforts. For instance, brainstorming in a group will produce more ideas than can be produced when the same set of individuals work alone. The product of brainstorming is a team product and not owned by the individual who actually came up with the idea the group eventually approves.

Teamwork, when functioning at its best, can do something that no individual alone can do, and that is "create geniuses." When groups of people work together they can be more creative and solve more problems than the smartest, most creative individual in the group.

6. REWARD COOPERATIVE EFFORTS. Most "common sense" notions of the world stress individual rewards rather than group ones. Learning environments shift the focus to joint efforts and joint rewards..

DO YOU PAY PEOPLE TO COOPERATE OR COMPETE?
A simple example brings this out. If a baseball team gave a bonus to the player with the most home runs at the end of the season, team members would stop helping one another. When a player went into a slump, everyone else would silently applaud because their chances of getting the bonus just went up. Management would inadvertently be rewarding people to hurt each other.

A baseball team is far better off when awards are for total home runs by the team, or awards are for any player who gets homeruns beyond some threshold. World series bonuses, for instance, are distributed equally across a team in order to encourage everyone to look out for the interests of the team as a whole.

Don't set up situations where there can be only one "winner" such as "Employee of the Month" or "Team of the Year."

SUMMARY OF CHAPTER TWO

  • Committing to continuous improvement means seeking perfection, but acknowledging that it is impossible to ever be perfect.

  • Stop kicking yourself for not being perfect, and accept the need for life-long improvement.

  • 5% to 10% of organization time should be spent on improving processes.

  • The organization must commit to using data instead of guesswork.

  • The organization must strive to drive out fear and create a safe learning environment.

  • Learning environments have six characteristics:

    • TRUST
    • BELIEF IN THE FUTURE
    • RESPECT AND DIGNITY
    • THE POWER TO CHANGE THINGS
    • TEAM APPROACH
    • REWARD COOPERATIVE EFFORTS

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven References and Copying Rights