House of Operational Excellence Part 7: The 2nd Pillar: Continuous Improvement Culture

Continuous Improvement Culture and Its’ 3 Building Blocks

One of the necessary conditions for Operational Excellence is a stable and capable delivery system. Another necessary condition is a continuous improvement culture.

An organization is absolutely on the path of Operational Excellence when there’s a culture of continuous improvement which means productivity is increasing on a continuous growth curve and employee morale is improving.

“Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.” – Benjamin Franklin

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Transcription:
In our House of Operational Excellence, we spoke earlier about the foundation of customer focus and leadership, and also on the first pillar of establishing a stable and capable delivery system. In this session, we're going to talk about the second pillar, which is the continuous improvement culture.

To me the culture is how people interact with each other within the organization, how decisions are made, how people treat each other and how work gets done within the organization.

This pillar consists of three building blocks. The first one is workforce capability and flexibility. The second one is focused improvement initiatives, and the third one is systematic capacity expansion.

In order to achieve operational excellence, we need both the foundation piece in place and the stable and capable delivery system before we start focusing on the continuous improvement culture. Remember that stable and capable delivery system, it's so important to get stability and capability before we start driving improvements within the organization. Trying to drive improvements without a stable system, it's just going to make this system more unstable, as Dr. Deming stated and promoted.

Our continuous improvement culture is about getting the workforce working together. First, we do that by creating that flexibility in the workforce. We'll talk about when we get to that building block, all the necessary and sufficient conditions to build that workforce capability and flexibility.

Then focused improvement initiatives. They're focused on driving the performance metrics. The KPIs we've defined in the performance metrics and the customer focus and leadership foundation piece. If the focus improvement initiative doesn't improve the performance of the KPIs, then don't do them. Remember focus means doing what should be done and not doing what shouldn't be done. So if it's not moving the needle on the performance KPIs of the organization, then don't do it. Don't waste your effort on doing things that aren't going to move the needle.

Also at this point, you should start to see increased customer demand because of your ability to deliver high quality on shortly time and reliably. Being able to grow the company and remain stable and capable through that growth curve is extremely difficult. So that's why this third building block is in place.

The continuous improvement culture is one of the pillars. It's an important part of operational excellence. We'll discuss in the next sessions how to go about changing the culture within the organization.