Building on Successful Improvement
Posted on July 13, 2010 Comments (3)
Do ‘Quick Wins’ Hurt Lean Initiatives?
If you don’t change how people think, the quick improvement can end up not helping much. I think quick wins help. But managing how those quick wins happen is important. Creating a maintaining a dialogue that while quick wins are possible, much bigger wins are possible by building on the gains to adopt more critical improvement (and often more complex and requiring more effort) .
As quick wins are achieved try and be sure they are building capacity at the same time. Get people to think in new ways and see improvement opportunities. Also have people learn new tools to attack more problems with. I firmly believe you learn lean best by doing lean. So getting quick successes is great training – better than classroom training. But in doing so, you do want to focus on making sure people understand how the quick fix is a process they can repeat to improve other areas.
And one of the skills you have to practice in the example mentioned in the post mentioned above is managing up. It is tricky but part of what you need to do is coach your bosses to understand lean so that you can expand the adoption of more lean thinking in your organization.
Related: How to Improve – Building a Great Workforce – Flaws in Understanding Psychology Lead to Flawed Management – Leadership
Categories: Management, Psychology, quote, Systems thinking
Tags: build capacity, coaching, leadership, management, managing people, Psychology, quote, tips
3 Responses to “Building on Successful Improvement”
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November 3rd, 2010 @ 10:41 am
[...] way to help the organization transform but they must 1) practice respect for people and 2) focus on building organizational capacity. Having, for example a few experts that are very focused on lean thinking and can be tapped by [...]
December 8th, 2010 @ 8:27 am
Favor efforts that will help you build organizational capacity to do more of what you want going forward (adopt lean thinking, use design of experiments…). Some of this is about building expertise in the organization. It is also about building your circle of influence…
November 16th, 2011 @ 5:19 am
[...] term as I am thinking of how to help. It is important to not just solve the current dilemma but to improve the organizational capacity to improve in the future. And for me that means increasing people’s understanding of the [...]