Continuous Improvement is the New Black: Doing More with Less

Continuous Improvement is the New Black: Doing More with Less

You might know about that fabled field, Continuous Improvement. We find it in manufacturing, and businesses who are so good at what they do, no one would ever think they needed to improve. That’s the beauty of this discipline: you know you’re doing it right when no one suspects a thing.

For those of you unfamiliar with CI and how it might be the difference between success and failure of your enterprise, it’s not just for manufacturing. In fact, the whole point of CI is taking what you know and using it to find out what you don’t know, so that you can be more efficient with what you have. Are you in a position where you’re running out of capital? CI. Are you just getting started and not sure why everything seems to be going wrong all the time? CI. Are you in a rut and feel hopeless about things ever improving? CI!

Continuous Improvement is a mentality and mindset about business that is rooted in reality. If you don’t really want to see or connect with the reality of your environment, you’re not ready for it. If you know that reality is where productive change occurs, read on.

CI is often not engaged with until a business is big enough that it’s becoming a sinking ship; because of issues in processes, employee management, and culture weighing it down (and sometimes even putting holes in the hull). But CI is not just for big business! It’s for you too, and that’s why I’m writing this article. Here’s three ways you can start to bring a CI mindset into your company.

1. It’s the Process, Not the People.

If there’s an issue in your organization, it’s very, very easy to look at the person responsible and say, “All of these people are incompetent.” And then you walk away, shaking your head because it’s all very simple and you cannot for the life of you figure out why people insist on overcomplicating things to the point of repeated mistakes. Here’s a new approach: Consider the process that person is running to execute the work. Is it simple? Is it convoluted? How many potential points are there for miscommunication, balls dropped, or distraction? Most repeated avoidable mistakes in an organization are due to bad processes, not bad people. Understanding this, and building out simple, effective processes with your team can save you in money, morale, and mistakes.

2. See Reality

Yuck. There’s that phrase again. I know we all like to think we are very attuned to what’s really going on – but when was the last time you actually checked? Went out to the production line and asked questions and listened to the answers? When was the last time you looked at the books and saw what was really going on? I am not accusing you of negligence or gross stupidity here – I’m asking you to take a step back and really consider what you see without making any excuses for yourself or anyone else. This is hard. It’s especially hard when you are the one in charge or the decision-maker in an organization. Why? Because as humans, sometimes it’s just easier to see things the way we want to see them. But you can’t improve anything if you aren’t dealing with reality first.

3. Practice Fire-Prevention

In small business, one of the things we get really good at is fire-fighting. There’s an issue, it has the potential to lose a key account, destroy our reputation as a reliable supplier, jeopardize a launch. So we call for all hands on deck, everyone works feverishly to correct the issue or get the deliverable out…and then we have to wake up the next day and do it all over again. There is a period of time for an organization that this is completely normal and okay – businesses have to figure out how to run, and this is part of learning. The problem arises when fire-fighting becomes a key tenant of the culture of an organization. Instead of learning from those mistakes, everyone dreads them but knows it’s just a matter of time. This is how people get burnt out in jobs they once loved. It’s also the single best way to run a business into the ground if that’s your goal. Fire prevention means looking at each mistake that happens, performing a Root Cause Analysis (RCA) to understand why it actually happened, and then addressing the failure in the process so that mistake doesn’t happen again. This approach provides stability for the company, and satisfaction for the people that fire-fighting cannot.

Continuous Improvement is the new black, you say? Yes. If embraced in small business, CI has the potential to completely change how businesses start up and transition as they grow. Do you want to create a stable, scalable, and sustainable business? CI will help you do this.

Learn more at www.tbd-strategies.com about how you can avoid common pitfalls in your business enterprise.