Introduction
After years spent working with organizations as large as 100,000+ employees, you encounter a vast spectrum of personalities and performers.
However, one trait overwhelmingly stands out as the single marker of high-performers, and that is the practice of consistent, deliberate, continuous improvement.
Contrary to what you see in movies and social media, the highest performers don’t rush. In fact, in most cases, they will seem to act relatively slowly from a micro hourly or daily perspective. However, the distinguishing variable is that they are relentlessly focused on continuous improvement, not just plain repetition of the same actions day after day.
Over time this seemingly slow and deliberate process creates consistent and steady progress, which ultimately results in an extraordinarily rapid improvement over the medium and long term (e.g. months and years). Hold this in comparison to someone who either just repeats the same actions year after year, or someone who sprints through a few improvements for a few weeks and then reverts back to normal for 6 months, and the Continuous Improvement process will always perform better in the long term.
The unacknowledged fact is this: show me an exceptional person, and i’ll show you someone whose life actually looks incredibly simple when you examine what they’re doing on a daily basis.
The foundational principle Practice Continous Improvement means that in every situation the best practice is to engage in continuous, incremental improvement in order to create the most significant impacts possible in any time frame.
The genesis and history of Continuous Improvement (CI) actually has significant relevance to its formulation and principles.
Many people mistakenly believe CI has its historical roots in the Japanese concept of “Kaizen”, translated as “change for the better”. However, the roots of CI actually trace back to the Training Within Industry (TWI) service, which was created and run during World War II by the United States Department of War, from 1940 to 1945.
The purpose of TWI was to create and ensure exceptional performance from US industries during the crisis period of WWII. Military conscription was creating a critical shortage of trained and skilled leaders and personnel at a time when sustaining industrial production and supply chains was crucial for the war effort. Thus TWI was rolled out in order to rapidly bring an effective methodology for improvement of effectiveness and efficiency across industrial production.
At a simplistic level, the TWI program taught how to perform job training and instruction, methods/process improvement, and team management. TWI used trainers to teach the program to over 1.5 million workers across the US.
Continuous Improvement came into play because during WWII resources were scarce, timelines were short, and successful delivery was a matter of life and death.
As a result, the TWI program pioneered an approach that focused on creating continual, small improvements that could preferably be implemented on the same day, as opposed to radical, uncertain, and potentially unsustainable changes.
The results were remarkable and helped to form the backbone of the US industrial effort under the incredible stress of WWII.
The history with Japan and Kaizen then followed in the post-war period. As part of the Marshall Plan and the United States’ effort to rebuild Japanese industry, the US sent industrial engineering experts to train and advise Japanese businesses.
Included among them were TWI trainers, who taught a program titled “Improvement in Four Steps” (Kaizen eno Yon Dankai), thereby introducing the practice of Kaizen to Japan, where it was later given widespread popularity by Masaaki Imai in 1985.
From these origins, the impacts of Continuous Improvement have now stretched widely across industry and society, and the results and benefits have been firmly and statistically proven across disparate areas.
Some of the most notable include:
- Manufacturing – most famously by Toyota in the automotive sector, but now widespread across all Manufacturing
- Healthcare – e.g. Mayo Clinic
- Government – e.g. US EPA, Nakano City
- Process and Quality improvement – e.g. Six Sigma
- Global standardization – e.g. ISO – International Organization for Standardization
A few examples of applying the Practice Continuous Improvement principle vs. waiting for sudden radical changes
1Start building standard templates for your day to day work – e.g. sales forecasts, S&OP, project reviews, reports, presentations, proposals, note-taking, etc. These small changes bring consistency and structure to processes and communication, save time, and prevent confusion.
2Every day, learn 1 new piece of technical knowledge relevant to your work, and 1 new piece of knowledge relevant to personal life/society. The method is irrelevant, you can read, listen, watch videos, discuss with others, etc.
3Continuously improve the effectiveness of meetings. Ensure you have clear agendas, preparation from all participants, and clear action items and follow-up. Remember that each minute is multiplied by the number of participants, so if you have 8 participants in a meeting, saving just 15 minutes per meeting is actually a total of 2 hours of the team’s time. Most office employees spend about 10 hours a week in meetings, so saving 15 minutes per hour totals 120 hours per year, which is 3 full weeks.
4Automate chores and errands one by one. For example, set up regular Amazon subscription deliveries for household supplies, use a robotic vacuum on a set schedule, set up regular grocery deliveries, etc.
5Acquire 1 weekly piece of feedback from your most trusted friend/mentor/colleague/advisor, etc. on the one specific action you can take in the next week to improve.
6Change just 1 aspect of your diet every 3 months, instead of waiting for some sudden restrictive diet. e.g. drink 4 liters of water per day, cut down your daily eating time window by 1 hour until you’re within 8-12 hours, add 1 additional vegetable per meal, remove 1 item with refined sugar per meal, etc.
7Make a small change like using larger water glasses, e.g. liter-sized or larger, which encourage and enable you to drink more water at a time.
Additional articles, case studies, maturity models, and tools coming soon.