KaiNexus: Continuous Improvement, Leadership, and More

There is a strong trend in organizations these days to apply improvement tools and techniques that originated on the manufacturing floor to other parts of the organization and other industries entirely. That is because the basis of these tools and the approach are not really related to manufacturing at all. Rather, they are about control, organizational alignment, and efficiency. What organization does not need more of those things?

When you started on your improvement journey, you may not realize it, but you actually already made a technology decision. I bet you probably managed the work in spreadsheets and bulletin boards - these are technology! Now that you are starting to engage more people in it, though, I bet that you are finding that it is hard to get the visibility you need to spread that culture efficiently and make sure nothing falls through the cracks. Your technology needs an upgrade. You could theoretically use Dropbox and a folder structure to manage critical components of your business - say, for example, your medical records or accounting transactions - but I promise you, no one is putting their organizations at risk like that. They use software built specifically for the business issue you are dealing with. It continues to baffle me that organizations do not take improvement software as seriously as they take their accounting platform or their medical records system.

Communication and organization are the keys to the success of Hoshin Kanri because managing long-term strategy, short-term goals, and daily improvement activities can be a huge challenge, especially if you have many people involved in the effort. For years, organizations have relied on tools such as complicated spreadsheets, email threads, file sharing systems, and even paper boards to track and manage the strategy, but these passive systems often fail to provide the support necessary to make lasting progress. They are time-consuming, rarely kept up-to-date, and ineffective at driving activity.

What are the traits you look for when you hire new employees? If you are like most people, you look for employees that are intelligent, capable, problem solvers who take the initiative to get stuff done and do it well. It is a shame that these same people who got hired for their mental faculties then so commonly get relegated to being a pawn in the corporate machine, with no autonomy or power to improve the business through their work.

Continuous quality improvement (CQI) is one of those things like a snow cone. It is something that pretty much everyone can agree is awesome. Who would not want it? Yet for some reason, not every organization has a plan for how to achieve CQI. Fewer still, have systems and processes in place to support it, and many that try never successfully reach their goals.

We do not think that companies should deploy process improvement software unless they have a clearly defined vision of what success looks like. Every company is trying to achieve something unique, of course, but we find some common goals for process improvement software among the most prepared organizations we encounter. Here are a few.

It looks simple at first, and a quick Google search will tell you what you need to get started - a way to capture ideas, a way to collaborate, leadership behaviors - there is so much content out there on this topic, it is easy to feel like an expert. Then, when you struggle to spread your improvement culture, you are left with a bag of moldy seeds wondering what went wrong.

The beginning of summer must be a good time for Kaizen events because we have been getting a lot of questions about them lately. We thought we would take a few minutes to answer the ones we hear most often.

Taiichi Ohno also said that Kaizen is about changing the way things are. If you assume that things are all right the way they are, you cannot do Kaizen. So, change something. Yes, there is some effort and time involved in implementing Standard Work, but the upside is enormous. If you are not using it, that may be the most important thing to change.

Whether you are new to huddle boards or have decided it’s time to move yours from the wall into the cloud, we offer you congratulations. Digital huddle boards are an excellent way to organize and track improvement projects. They have the potential to increase the number of completed improvements and to help you prove how valuable this effort is to the organization.