1. © Cotton Innovations Ltd 2016
For further information on this subject and other business tools contact:
Brad Cotton – brad@cottonci.com
Telephone +44 (0)7867 305 043
Other newsletters at cottonci.com/blogs
"Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose"—"the more it changes, the more it's the same thing"
Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr (24 November 1808 – 29 September 1890) French critic, journalist, and novelist.
Using the tools of Lean and Six Sigma to change your business
“Most people spend more time and energy going around problems than trying to solve them” – Henry Ford
February 2016
Making the outside look
good is more important
than making the inside
right…
I was driving down a local road in my
city at the weekend and my eye was drawn to paint peeling
on a number of roadside lamp posts and graffiti on bridges.
In itself this is not unusual but what was significant about
this section of road was that several years ago we had a
royal visit from Prince Charles at the
National Agricultural Centre.
At the time of the visit it was easy to see
the route he was to take as all the wayside
furniture (signs, lamp posts, bridges etc.)
was replaced, painted and tidied up. All
this to make the city look nice from his
perspective and create a good image as he drove quickly by.
Several years on, we
now have the graffiti
back on the bridges; the
roadside looks like any
other roadside with
weathered and peeling
paint; and the evidence of
his visit is no longer
obvious. Most people
wouldn’t even know that
he had been here at all.
This led me to thinking
about how many people and companies embark on great
initiatives of CI. They paint just the “outside of the process”,
and ignore the basic problems. The process is broken and
uncared for, and over time the old/bad practices are
allowed to drift back in.
How does this happen if we find such great savings and
benefits from all this great work? Why go backwards?
To my mind, there are two reasons:
The first reason – the culture never changed. If this has
never changed the people won’t embrace the need to
change in the first place.
The second reason is that the root cause was never found.
If this is not addressed, or really found, then Jean-Baptiste
is right. All that we do will not create sustainable change,
and we will end where we began.
Let us spend a moment on the first issue - culture.
Culture change starts with a
“team centred” recognised need
to change (Kotter - step 1). This
is not about adopting someone’s
culture /words or trying to be
oriental. This is about
understanding the reasons why
we do what we do and our
values and beliefs. It ends with us anchoring our change and
replacing the old ways of working (Kotter - step 8). I fear that
many of our change programmes begin instead with
communicating a vision, (Kotter - step 4) and end with quick
wins (Kotter - step 6).
Starting and stopping here, we are creating ‘my world of
improvement’ not ours, and making people busy with
changing things without reason. All of this work doesn’t
embed, stick or create long term change. As a result, the
current ‘local culture’ doesn’t develop a better way of
working does not germinate.
"Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose"—
"the more it changes, the more it's the same
thing"
The second reason - finding the
root cause – this is harder. We
need to invest time and effort to
find the reasons ‘why’ things are
the way they are. This may also
require a culture change within
our teams. In going for the fast wins and addressing the
surface issues, we are like the people running around a
disease-ridden forest, pulling bad leaves off the trees in an
attempt to stop the problem. Whereas, we really need to
attend to the root cause of the disease in order for the
forest to be repaired.
Let us therefore renew our commitment and strive to create
sustainable long term benefits.