When you are leading continuous improvement projects , it can sometimes feel lonely if you seem to be the only one outputting ideas and options. Talking to yourself... that's how it can feel. A really good strategy, to get your team involved, is to share some building blocks with them. Instead of feeling like you need to provide a working solution, teach your team to 'fish'. Can you remember that phrase? “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” We can change it to something like this: "Give a team a solution and they'll continue to expect you to produce all the solutions; teach a team building blocks of continuous improvement and you can unleash them on all your future challenges." I might be taking some liberties here, but I think you get the gist of what I am trying to say. There is a trade off with doing continuous improvement and teaching ideas, but getting this balance (between learning and impl

One of the curious things I see in business is the planning for improvement objectives (or any other kind of objective, for that matter). Well, I say curious. That's probably the wrong word... Often I see no planning for an objective. This is how it looks to me: In the above image, something magical is expected to happen. No input from anyone (let alone management!). The result just appears. You'll know that this rarely works, so excuse me for stretching this scenario to its irrational extent. Reality says that the image below is what should happen: So, you might be thinking that this is stupidly obvious, so let me pose a question for you: "How effective is your planning to achieve your objectives?" Do you include all of the steps? Do you assign responsibilities? Do you determine deadlines for the tasks? Do you review progress regularly? If your planning looks a little more like the top image, please take stock of what you do and what improvements you can make. And,

There are a number of ways to look at change. 1. Wait until what you are going to do is perfect, then launch the change. 2. Accept 'winning ugly' and incrementally improve what you are doing until you are satisfied with the results. Option 1 is sometimes required, but only when it is a specific requirement of the change project. The rest of the time, option 2 is available to us. But, when you over think the process of change, or you have bosses that want to see results immediately you can end up with option 3; no results. Let's think through option 2. Today you don't have the improvement. Tomorrow you could have a slightly better version. This could be repeated day after today, until one day, you have the result you need. Very few of us have time to stop our day jobs and dedicate ourselves to improvement projects. So, this strategy can work for the majority of us. If you find yourself being stuck with your changes, try embracing incremental change a little more. Giles

This is a great continuous improvement question . When you are looking at spending money, this question can often be the one you need to make the right decision. Is there a better way to spend the cash you have available to you? Are there other options that you have yet to explore? Are you committed to the solution you have put forward? If this was your money, and this was the option to go for, you know the answer would be "yes" to the original question. You would know that spending the money would be the right thing to do. If you feel hesitation when you think about this question, you know that you have more work to do. An old boss of mine asked me the question once. That's all it took for it to sink into my brain. At some point, as your career progresses, every decision becomes easier to see as a financial one. When you are looking at the pros and cons of an investment / purchase / decision, there will be a financial impact. So, if you are committed to the decision, as

Of course, I hope you say 'yes!' to this question. But, too many people in our businesses don't know all of the steps. Why might this be: Are the steps too confusing? Are the steps not visible to staff? Are the steps not taught to your team when they join? Are there too many options, to be able to define the steps? Are the steps kept inside the heads of a few team members? If your results are suffering as a result of a lack of knowledge inside your business, use these five questions as a way to reflect. Thankfully, once you  have worked out which one is most likely to be your problem, you just need to flip the situation around to define your strategy: Simplify. Promote and use visual aids. Revamp your induction. Standardise. Write it down. The benefits from having clearer processes revolve around improved customer satisfaction, better profits and less dependency on individuals. If this kind of situation sounds good to you, check out my book Losing the Cape . It looks at opt

One of my consulting clients made a statement during a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) review session: "Consistency is the key" I agree with them. In their case, this wasn't happening at the time they made the statement. It was something they had to work towards and something that paid off for them. What happens when you aim to be consistent? Standards within the business get lived up to. Staff know where they stand. Management becomes easier. Policies mean something. Incongruities evaporate. Even better, consistency can lead to: Higher profits Happier customers A feeling of moving ahead with your plans. I always tell my consulting clients that 4/5 is a pretty good place to aim for at the outset. Whilst you are working on your continuous improvements you will find obstacles in your way. Look at each obstacle and remove it. Your consistency will raise to this level if you repeat this process. If you are thinking that managing all of your obligations is too onerous at this

I was recently presented with a client's list of improvements for 2024. It was a good list, there were plenty of meaningful items on there. They had a problem, however. They didn't know where to start. If you have read my books , or my blog posts, you'll know that I am a big advocate of proper prioritisation of improvements. Our PDCA Complete continuous improvement platform has a built in prioritisation tool (the BCS scoring system ). I really do think it is important that you know what you should be working on first. So, back to my client's list. Before we even had to prioritise anything, a clean up of the list was in order. There were items that were: Strategic in nature. Waiting for a director to make a decision and set policy. Outstanding tasks, that just needed mopping up. Urgent items that needed doing now but weren't projects. Once the team got clear about what was what, prioritising the strategic projects was straightforward. If you have a similar situation