“Kaizen”, or continuous improvement, accomplished by lots of small improvements by everyone in an organisation, is well recognised and accepted as foundational to sustainable Operational Excellence.

Despite knowing this, and even believing in it, many organisations struggle to implement effective and sustainable schemes to accomplish this. I have heard many tales of bad experiences with such schemes, and have identified a number of common problems.

This article explores these problems and suggests actions for implementing a highly effective scheme that will deliver benefits to employees and the organisation.

Are you stuck in a cycle of setting goals and then missing them? While there may be genuine reasons why goals have been missed, a lot can be to do with what’s going on inside your own heads and those of our teams heads. This article explores how we sometimes sabotage ourselves and how taking time for some deep reflection can set us up for greater personal and organisational success in the coming year.

Achieving sustainable “high performance with ease” requires a number of inter-related elements all working together in harmony as a system. In this article I identify each of the elements and:

• what is needed and why it is needed in each element

• what happens if any are missing.

Is continuous improvement in your organisation a habit or an effort? Or, put more simply, is CI seen as an additional task or part of ‘business as usual’? CI is an essential part of a high-performing operation, yet often doesn’t fully take root because people see it as extra work. This article explores what is involved in making CI a “habit” - something that is a natural part of everyone’s work. It outlines how to create the right climate and routines as part of normal operations and explores the critical difference between the “healthy pursuit of perfection” and the potentially damaging “perfectionism”.

Is achieving regular high performance taking too much effort? While you may be meeting your customer requirements, are managers and teams spending all their time reacting to day-to-day issues? Imagine how things could be high performance was achieved almost automatically, leaving plenty of time for improvements and strategic actions that would move your business forward. This article unpacks how this can be achieved.

The causes of delays, excessive firefighting and late deliveries are many and varied. On the surface, they are often put down to poor management of the operational areas themselves. However, the problem can often be found much earlier in the ‘order–to–delivery’ cycle – operational plans based on flawed assumptions about what is possible. This leads to unrealistic and unachievable plans that no amount of improvement in operational processes will fix, and high levels of “failure cost” as team struggle to keep up.

This article explores three key “false beliefs” around planning and proposes four fundamental planning “rules” to create plans that everyone agrees are realistic and achievable. This will ensure that products and services are delivered to your customers on time, every time without overstressing your teams.

Most business leaders know that a strong focus on providing a great service to customers makes good business sense. However, experience shows that knowing this at senior level and having a strong service ethos in customer–facing functions doesn’t always deliver the hoped–for result. It can often seem that the attention of the operational areas of the business is elsewhere. IN his article we explore the reasons for this and identify one fundamental principle and four areas for action to address this challenge.

Many organisations believe in the value of engaging all of their people in continuous improvement. yet often they struggle to make it a sustainable reality. After initial enthusiasm, engagement drops off and the performance gains are lost. This article explores what might be missing and how you can make “everyday, everybody, everywhere” improvement a reality.

As senior leaders, are you unintentionally sabotaging your organisation’s Operational Excellence efforts by demonstrating behaviours that work against creating the necessary conditions for success. In this article we examine what these behaviours might be and what alternatives are required.

Organisations undertaking improvement activities across the whole organisation often find that the “sum of the parts” does not deliver the bottom line impact they expected. Individual improvements turn out to have adverse effects elsewhere in the organisation that can make things worse rather than better. What’s needed is a holistic approach the explores the interdependencies of the individual actions to come up with a cohesive routemap to move them towards their vision. This article explores how.

Many organisations struggle to achieve their improvement goals because they focus purely on the results and don’t go deeper to describe the conditions that they need to create to achieve them. This article identifies why that is important and how you can go about so. It also suggests what that vision might look like for a high performing operation.

How important is it to be a “learning organisation”? While the term may have fallen out of regular use, the ideas it contains are an essential foundation for a culture of continuous improvement and operational excellence. this article explore some of the challenges involved and how to overcome them.

December is upon us. You may be tempted to breathe a huge sigh of relief that this challenging year is almost over.

However, it’s also a great time to stop and reflect on the year to date, particularly in terms of what happened to those business goals you set at the start of the year. What has been achieved, what have your learned and how might that influence your plans for 2023.

Taking time to pause and reflect on the past year is likely to accelerate your progress on your gaols in the year ahead. This article shows you how.

A commonly cited cause of problems in organisations is “human error.” Yet digging a little deeper reveals that the true cause is far more likely to be the “system” within which the people operate. This article explores some of the underlying causes and what action can be taken to eliminate them.

There are so many problem solving methods and tools out there these days, it can be hard to know which ones to choose. However, by understanding the common core structured underpinning every method plus the factors which determine which method and tools fit best, navigating this complex landscape can be made much simpler.

Much is written about problem solving tools and techniques. However, without the right mindset about problems in an organisation, these tools may not be applied effectively. In this article, we suggest a “problem solving maturity” model to help you assess where your organisation is in terms of its problem-solving culture.

Sometimes a continuous improvement team can get stuck and struggle to put theory into practice. This team needed a breakthrough, which we provided by facilitating a Rapid Improvement Event. This provided a “step change” in performance, engaged shop floor staff in a way that had not been done before and provided the impetus for the team to tackle improvement in a radically different way in future.

In almost every operational improvement programme I’ve been involved in, setting up a powerful daily routine to focus on performance and improvement has been at the core. With clarity of PURPOSE and a focus on PEOPLE, a daily management PROCESS centred on an effective daily stand-up meeting with good visual performance management can radically transform the performance of a team - more clarity, more control, more focus and time to work on real improvements.

How often have you had the experience that you’ve tried to introduce a change and others don’t seems as engaged with it as you are. Are they just not committed or is there more you need to do to set them up to succeed?

In this second article on establishing powerful daily routines in your business, we consider the people dimension and how you can establish the ideal conditions for your people to flourish.

All too often solving daily problems seems to take all of your time and you can’ t see how to make time to work on improvements. Yet breaking out of this vicious cycle can be as simple as giving yourself permission to walk away from the noise for as little as 15 minutes a day. This article explains how.