I chatted with a production team the other day about ways in which we could improve their performance . They had recently overcome some major operational issues but still weren't in a place that they needed to be. We overcame the awkwardness of the conversation by talking about the overall ambitions of the business and the relevance to them and then got talking about general performance improvement. Available from Amazon and iTunes At first the conversation was really stilted because, for them, where do you start? This is a challenge for all management and leadership to overcome, helping your teams to see the opportunities for improvement and then helping them to help themselves get past this sticking point into action. In this particular conversation I split up the ambitions of the business into multiple areas. Each area was small enough to have a meaningful discussion around it that naturally generated a range of improvement opportunities for the team. Breaking big pictur...

Have you tried the Concern - Cause - Countermeasure approach with your team? You might also know it as CCC or 3Cs, either way it is a brilliant tool to help you engage your teams and manage continuous improvement opportunities. I help many of my clients to use this tool and it really does help to make the improvement conversation flow. I have just uploaded a template and instructions, to help you get the most out of the CCC approach, to my main website here -  http://www.systemsandprocesses.co.uk/process-improvement-download-toolkits/ccc-worksheet/ If you are looking for a quick way to engage your teams, focus on a specific improvement topic, or drive general improvements within a function of your business it really is a great tool. And, as with most of these things, the way that you apply it is key to getting great results. The short (only 3 pages) instructions can help you to do this. As it is part of the Kit 'n' Go range on my website the whole download is only ...

Continual improvement only happens when you actually do something. So, why do we generally spend so much time talking about change rather than doing something about it? Available on Kindle , iBooks and in paperback Whilst there are a whole range of reasons as to why we opt for debate rather than action, most of them boil down to people being afraid of change itself. With that in mind, here are three quick and simple ways to get change to start taking effect if it has stalled in your business. Use experiments Remember when you were at school and you performed experiments? You didn’t know what the outcome was going to be and that was OK . When we undertake continual improvement activities it is highly likely that we don’t exactly know the right formula for a successful change. So, we can use the same idea (it is an experiment) and learn from our results. We don’t have to be iron cast with our changes and by sharing this lack of expectation with our team can help to do just ...