Continuous Improvement: Do We In The Profession Need To Take Our Own Medicine?

      In the last few PIPs, I went over a number of tools and techniques in the quality improvement profession.  They are cross training, best practices, benchmarking & kaizen events.  Each, if properly applied in the right circumstances, is powerful.  My concern is those four and a number of others are losing their effectiveness in the complex organizations we work in today.  Have our organizations developed a resistance and like some animal and vegetable pests, become ‘immune’ to the power and effectiveness of our tools and techniques?

       Which begs a question which I have been wrestling with since I started the series which is do we focus to improve our profession with the intense focus we work to improve our professions and industries?  I remember reading a baseball pitcher late in his career saying “I throw the baseball just as hard as I always did but it doesn’t go as fast.”  Are we in this profession experiencing the same effect with our tools and techniques?

      My view is that we have improve our profession but nowhere near as quickly as we need to.  Our past efforts have greatly improved organizations of all sizes and types.  But most if not all of the low to middle hanging fruit has been picked.  To paraphrase a prominent management author, as powerful as our tools and techniques are those that ‘got us here are not going to get us there’.  We need to continually improve our profession’s performance.

      So what should we do?  We need to keep our eyes out for tools and techniques in other industries and professions which we can ‘adapt and adopt.’  Ask some of your neighbors and members of other business and civic organizations what are some tools and techniques they use.  We also need to remember to not take the ‘vaccination theory’ approach to whatever education, training or certification have.  All our knowledge will need to be ‘continually improved’ with booster shots, ‘now and forever.’