Why sink? Arm yourself with a Strategy for Improvement before diving in.

It’s a new year and you’re revving and ready to kick-off with a series of improvement projects. This may not be you, but a common affliction is to dive in with real enthusiasm but without first laying the ground work that gives guidance and direction to employees when they most need it. The result? Halfway through the year you find the indicators are not at the level they should be and in some cases improvement reviews degrade to a focus on who didn’t do what rather than what to do next–an ongoing, heated topic that just keeps gathering steam. By the end of the year, teams have contracted improvement fatigue, and are unsure if all the training and effort actually made a difference. Attendance and participation wanes. People begin to mutter “Lean doesn’t work…”.

If you know what I mean and you’ve felt this pain, keep reading. There are some practical tips I can share to mitigate the potential Lean Improvement-let-down that will only taint what should be a truly exceptional journey. I don’t mean to paint a negative light, but I have empathy with organizations who experience it and there are some insider tips that can help you through it. And now's the time to do it.

Before I go into various tools and techniques that work, I can’t resist but first lay down a law. A truth, I believe will set your improvement strategy apart from your competition or other facilities you may compare yourself to. And it’s simple:

Resist the urge to copy and paste!

There is real value in learning from great companies such as Toyota, and I guarantee when you read up on successful case studies you’ll discover real pearlers to try out. But every organization is different in some way. Each Business Strategy is unique. Every Organization needs its own, personalised Clear Direction, based on the real needs of Customers and Patients, Shareholders, the Business, Employees­ and the Environment. With your Organization’s strategy in hand for the next 3 to 5 years or longer, you describe what must change in your operations to build the capacity and capability over time to meet the stretched goals. This is where articulating Clear Direction is so valuable.

So this describes the ‘why’ of Clear Direction but ‘what’ can you do about it?

If it's available, first clarify the Business Strategy. What’s the plan, what objectives must be met and which indicators must shift and over what period? This is your first clue and an Improvement Strategy struggles to flourish when it operates within a vacuum and is starved of context. The risk of going it alone, is that the effort you pour into mini-changes and breakthrough achievements may not yield any real benefit to the Organization, Customer, Employees or Environment, regardless of how commendable they appear. Table 1 is an example of what I mean. Before you dive, clarify where the Organization is going and what needs addressing so that the projects you pick out have real clout behind them.

Table 1: The Voice of the Business (or Hospital / Clinic) is used as an input to defining Clear Direction

Without Customers and Patients, the Organization has little Purpose. It’s a non-negotiable step to hear The Voice of the Customer so that your improvement effort aims to improve the value you bring to them. Quick acid test: do you understand the Voice of the Customer (or Patient) from their perspective, or is it your personal interpretation of what you think they need? If it’s the latter, ouch! Don’t fall into this trap (as I have before)–this has to be from their point of view and not your own. This is a much more challenging route to take, but it's the high road and far more useful to the change effort. If you have many Customers with a multitude of needs, consider categorising Customer types, separating the vital few from the useful many (Juran: 1992). Then explore the vital few in more detail with input from sources such as:

• Complaint and compliment mechanisms
• Customer-facing staff interviews
• Social network comments
• Customer interviews
• Surveys
• Focus groups
• “Go See” for yourself at the Customer
• Sales data and sales preferences
• Returns / refunds data
• Contract cancellations

It’s a big job to get the view, but what insight it can bring! Table 2 illustrates a simplified example of intel used as an input to the Improvement Strategy.

Table 2: The Voice of the Customer is used as an input to defining Clear Direction

I’ve learned the hard way never to underestimate the power of Employee intelligence. Without doubt, they know a lot more about what must change than we will ever know, so why waste that incredibly valuable insight? In some cases it makes sense to run a formal survey (see a detailed example in Clear Direction, Heathcote, 2014). In other cases, just talking to people and gathering what most people are saying about the operations is gold. Just be prepared to act on what they share with you since asking for opinion only to have nothing come of it is highly demotivating and counteracts the engagement you seek. Granted, it's not always possible to fix everything that comes up, but it's worth tackling the issues that the majority of staff are concerned about.

Around 10 years ago I read 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - An Enquiry into Values' (Pirsig: 1999) and it struck a cord with me. It got me thinking about how we make choices when we set an Improvement Strategy in motion. It made me wonder whether we end up doing what's new and on trend, what's easiest or what's best. It was a painful reminder that taking the more difficult route may be the right way to tackle the journey rather than taking the easier, more obvious path. This is why I urge you to go through the pain of the upfront planning before diving in. Once you have done the homework, your Clear Direction will materialize, making it easier to move the organization in the right way and tackle the important stuff in stages–even if it takes many iterations to get there!

Figure 1 is an example of a simple diagram, the North Star, that encapsulates the Improvement Strategy so that the analysis of the issues you move forward with reaps results. The launchpad for change is ready for the Organization’s lift-off. The team now has guidance on what to look for when doing their Value Stream Mapping, 5S, Problem Solving, Visual Control, Gemba Walks or any other nifty Lean tools and techniques they get stuck in with. The tools have evolved into a way to expose the issues related to the North Star. This means the team can sift through the issues, expose the important ones, and throw time and energy into the projects that matter. Goal alignment becomes a reality.

Figure 1: North Star example which articulates Clear Direction from the perspective of the Organization, the Customer, the Employee and the Environment. Over time, once problems are better understood through tools such as Value Stream Mapping, you can fine-tune the descriptions and show measurables for each focus area.

The North Star (Polaris) has historically been used to navigate Northwards and to determine latitude. Should you find yourself lost on a clear night with no GPS technology or compass in hand, it remains a reliable gauge of the positioning of North. An interesting fact to note that the North Star, although dependable in it’s constant position in the sky, does shift slightly over time. In the context of Operational Excellence, your North Star is your navigation guide, the beacon towards which sustained levels of improvement are directed. As with Polaris, it does not shift dramatically but rather, shifts gradually over time,–not unlike your strategy should.

For more tools, techniques and examples to support your improvement journey, refer to Clear Direction (Heathcote, 2014) and Making a Difference (Heathcote, 2016).