Be 10% Better. Faster.

In today's complex and dynamic business world, it no longer works for a few key individuals to call the shots and seek out opportunities to improve. Your business will be successful if everyone looks to improve every aspect of their work continuously. What's needed is a new operating system. A new way of thinking about work. A new way to conduct day to day work and weave in continuous improvement. A system that mobilises and coordinates the brainpower of everyone in your organisation to improve every day. 

To be better. Faster. Three things need to happen:

1. You need to make improvement and innovation everyone's responsibility it no longer works to have a few individuals calling the shots and making the improvements. Everybody needs to continuously improve. The power of the many is game-changing. You need to unite your teams, so they won't be denied what they seek. Build the steadfast ownership that makes discovering new ways part of the day to day job. 
2. You need all to adopt a new mindset. We all can make things better. Let's tap into that. We were born with an abundant curiosity. Let's bring this back through experimental thinking. 
3. You need to get things done. You need to be on the front foot, ready to attack the opportunities around you. Willing and able to challenge self and others to make a difference. Brave and courageous to go after the big problems holding you back or to seek those bold opportunities rarely pursued. 

Be Better. Faster with Cadence

Our approach is a proven process to embed a culture of continuous improvement as a daily practice.

We UNITE your teams, so they won't be denied what they seek.

We help them to EXPLORE new ways of working by utilising scientific thinking.

We inspire them to go out and ATTACK opportunities through simple experiments.

Our practice is called Cadence. This way of working makes continuous improvement a daily practice as a natural way of working. Performance improvements occur with a daily rhythm, creating a momentum of marginal gains and the occasional giant leaps across your business.

Cadence employs disciplined routines to create new loops of improvement within your teams continuously. It drives new thinking. It establishes performance dialogues that hold people to account. It fosters learning that then sparks new loops of improvement. Cadence becomes a way of being. A way to be efficient and effective. A way to discover new insights and spark creativity. A way to implement action. A way to scale improvement and innovation. A way to be better. Faster.

Frequently Asked Questions about Cadence

Isn't that just a daily management system?

Yes, however with a focus on improvement, rather than just getting back to standard. It's a focus on harnessing the diversity we have in organisations and connecting people with it. It's about collaborating and co-creating effective solutions to the real problems and opportunities in the business.

Why is it called Cadence?

I took the name from my experience with changing my Cadence when running. It was a gamechanger for me when running long distances. The premise is to get your Cadence (frequency of step count) higher, by taking shorter steps more frequently. It reduces stress in the muscles so your legs can carry you further. Our research has found that Cadence is a game-changer in business too. If you're all making small improvements and challenging yourselves with higher frequency, the net effect is more significant. 

Managing the work more frequently sounds a lot of effort. Does this take more time?

Like in running or cycling, the thought of having to move faster, feels like it's going to be more work and consume more energy, when in fact the opposite is true. Putting systems in like Cadence, people at first feel it will take more time and energy, they quickly realise it frees them up! Having the discipline to follow the routines Cadence prescribes actually frees capacity of leaders and teams. They find that creating more stable processes frees them up to be innovative and responsive to opportunities. They stop being busy fools and ensure they are all working on the right thing, at the right time.

Discipline equals Freedom

What can I do to implement Cadence?

Cadence involves some simple steps all can adopt.

1. Align the team to your strategy. People have to know where they are going so that they can make the choices of how best to get there, and to avoid any blockers they come against.
2. Understand the flow of value - Ensure everyone understands the flow of value to the customer. What aspects of their work contributes towards this flow, and what doesn't.
3. Create the one truth - visualise your progress, so it is transparent for all to see. Set clear targets and record how you are against these. Make all the metrics that count visible. What gets measured gets managed. You get what you inspect, not what you expect!
4. Connect - Collaborate - Co-create - set a time during the day to meet as a team to review progress. Connect with the metrics and see what can be improved. Ensure the best ideas win and co-create solutions.
5. Do what's in your control - while there may be so many things to improve, the best improvements are the ones you can do today. Do what's in your control. Do this every day, and you'll see massive gains. The deliberate practice of speculating an improvement, running the test and learning from it, it drives more of these loops. The more people looping, the more significant the impact.

Any tools I can use to help me with this?

• Leadership, Leadership, Leadership - mobilising people to think and act in different ways is a leadership challenge. All leaders need to step up and speak up and take on this challenge to develop and coach their people.
• Value stream mapping - This tool is often used to identify improvements up and down the value stream. It's a way of capturing what's going on now and capturing what should be ( or the right state). Action plans can then be created to get us closer to this "right state". It's also a fantastic tool so all can understand the whole process and see how they can contribute towards its success.
• Visual Performance Management - This method allows everyone to see the progress of the work against the targets set. At a glance, you can see if you have hit the target or not. If not, this is an indicator or flag to spark an improvement loop. Visual management allows everyone to see abnormalities, focusing management time on support. Ensuring the interactions are learning and action led, as opposed to just reporting progress.
• Kata Coaching - Like Value Stream Mapping, improvements come from a better and more in-depth understanding of what is going on. Kata Coaching popularised by Mike Rother helps build this understanding and learning while making improvements. Aimed at the value-added level (where the real work gets done) this coaching technique creates the environment for team members to take the ownership of improvements in their area, it aligns them to the business objectives, and creates the environment for them to feel empowered.
• Problem Solving - Our ability to improve relies on us fully understanding the problem. Our mental models often leave us blinkered to the directly observable data. We draw assumptions, leading to incorrect conclusions causing us to act down a particular path that may be wrong. A structured unbiased approach to problem-solving that brings together the diverse thinking of the team accelerates our learning and our improvements.
• Creative Thinking - We can make all the marginal gain improvements in the world; success is with the customer. If we are making something really efficiently but the customer isn't buying we need to do something different, quickly! In our complex and dynamic business world, we need to be on the front foot, thinking about innovation and generating divergent novel ideas then bringing it back together through convergence, making the novel ideas useful.

Questions

What questions have you got about "Cadence".

What stands out to you in this article?

What's missing for you?

Let me know

Written by Aaron L Penwill

Managing Director and Head of Performance at Lean Practice Ltd. 

Speaker | Executive Coach | Programme Facilitator | Transformational Consultant 

Former Continuous Improvement Director at Balfour Beatty Construction and Global Learning Lead at De La Rue Plc. Aaron has over 20 years of people and process improvement. He is a loving husband and father of two. He resides in York and never too far from his running shoes, bike or surfboard.