What You Will See and Hear in a Culture of Continuous Improvement

Culture is a somewhat elusive concept. In this article, it’s compared to the wind in that it is invisible yet its effect can be seen and felt.

For many businesses, the allure of ‘a culture of continuous improvement’ is appealing.

I put ‘a culture of continuous improvement’ on my list of abstract, fluffy business jargon alongside ‘high performing teams’. Such terms are thrown about more or less unthinkingly and mean very little outside a specific context. However great they sound, they are blindingly obvious ; any business would aspire to achieve them. They express nothing actionable.

Translating the elusive into the concrete entails vividly describing what improvement looks, sounds and feels like. We should be able to walk into a business and observe immediately whether there is a culture of continuous improvement. The question is more binary than it’s often made out to be.

These are some of this things you may see, hear or feel when you make your way around a business with a continuous improvement culture:

1. Performance transparency: You can see and hear performance transparency.

2. Curiosity and openness to challenges: You can hear that people are curious and open to challenge.

3. Root cause problem solving: You can see and hear people who do the work solving their own operational problems.

4. Leadership behaviours: You can see leaders where the work is and hear them coaching improvement using structured, codified questioning.

1. Performance transparency

You can see and hear performance transparency.

Walking around a business that has embraced continuous improvement, you’ll notice that workflow and the issues that compromise flow are visible. Operational performance will be clear at a glance.

“Have incidents been resolved with the target SLA?”

“Have orders been shipped on time?”

“Are the product team on track to deliver the planned user stories in a given sprint?”

You should be able to answer these questions without having a single conversation.

To get to that position, the business will have embraced visual management, normally in the form of physical or digital huddle boards displaying key information such as workflow, problems, capacity management plans, performance against KPIs that ladder up to strategic outcomes, and so on.

This allows problems that impact flow to be spotted early and resolved as a result.

Alongside the tangible aspects, performance visibility will also manifest in what you hear.

There’ll be transparency in the dialogue between people at all levels. Failure will be embraced as an opportunity to improve.

2. Curiosity and openness to challenges

You can hear that people are curious and open to challenge.

If you’ve ever worked in an environment where people don’t feel safe to challenge existing practices, you’ll know that it’s severely disempowering. A culture of curiosity encourages questions. They are the spur for every conversation and the drive behind every action. This culture of exploration leads to continuous improvement and innovation.

So as you listen to the dialogue you’ll notice a healthy, dynamic tension between people. You’ll hear questions such as ‘why?’, ‘what if?’, ‘have you considered?’ and ‘how might we?’. You’ll encounter people encouraging each other to explore new paths and to challenge their own assumptions and those of others.

3. Problem-solving

You can see and hear people who do the work solving their own operational problems.

Often, you will hear about operational excellence/business improvement/continuous improvement functions that provide a service to the rest of an organisation. ‘Practitioners’ parachute in, solve operational challenges, then move onto the next problem.

Whilst this may be true for larger and more complex challenges, this approach seldom changes the culture.

Moreover, many organisations put up barriers that limit the path to continuous improvement. Got an idea for improvement? Okay, well, you’ll need to raise that into the transformation board, then the change board... oh, and then we probably need to get approval from the risk board. Did I also mention that the next board meeting is in a couple of weeks? By the time you’ve navigated these arduous processes, the problem could have been solved.

I’m not suggesting that you should create anarchy, with people implementing a range of solutions that consume resource and have no link to strategic intent. But you’ll be amazed how many problems can actually be solved at an operational level without any investment. For me, that is the secret sauce of continuous improvement.

With such barriers bypassed you’ll see collaborative teams participating in root cause problem-solving sessions. More importantly, you will see how these sessions are integrated rather than incremental to the day job. Far from costing time, they form part of the standard week for all operational staff.

4. Leadership behaviours

You can see leaders where the work is and hear them coaching improvement using structured, codified questioning.

In a mature continuous improvement environment there is a fundamental shift in how leaders lead. Leaders are no longer confined to sitting behind a desk. They regularly go to where the work is. They embed an improvement habit and mindset through frequent, intentional questioning that guides their team through the problem solving cycle.

How do leaders do all this on top of their day job? They don’t! It becomes part of their day job and their daily management rituals. So, as you wander around the business, you’ll see leaders in amongst the teams and attending huddles and problem-solving sessions.

To create a culture of continuous improvement, people must practice problem-solving at every level of an organisation. Improvement must be habitualised and internalised by everyone.

Organisations on the early part of the journey should start small, build capability, embed it into daily management, and have leaders role-model the right behaviours. The shift from doing to being doesn’t happen overnight. But once you are self sufficient in continuous improvement and delivering a constant stream of improvements, you will be rewarded with transformational results.