Continuous Improvement Blockage: Struggling with "Stuck" People?

In my travels around the world, I have spent time in many airports. There have been times where flights were delayed and caused shorter than expected connection times. I remember a time, when my plane arrived at a connecting airport and I had about 5 minutes to make it from A1 to Z99. Or at least it seemed that way. Can any of you relate?

At this point, I had three choices. First, I could simply miss my flight...I wasn't about to allow this to happen! Second, I could call upon one those golf cart vehicles to move me through the airport...again, not really an option for me. This left me with one plausible choice: Button up my suit coat, pull up my trousers, hold my computer bag close to my chest, grasp tightly the handle of my roller carry-on, and run as fast as I could through the airport, weaving in and out of people, and make my connection. 

As I waited in line to deboard the plane, I prepared myself for the journey ahead. Then, just as I stepped off the plane, I entered into an all-out sprint across the airport. While running, I noticed there were others in the airport who had made the same choice. By the time I passed sections M and N, sweat was running down my face. My suit coat had come unbuttoned. My collared shirt was untucked and soaked with sweat. My arms were ready to fall off from carrying my two bags along side. If I had hair, it would have been a mess.

Then, I saw something I will never forget. 

It was like a light shined down from above. Everything inside me jumped for joy!

It was a moving walkway!

In fact, I could see, going forward, these moving walkways ran all the way down the middle of the airport. Could it be that I could actually make my flight? 

I entered the moving walkway, still on a sprint, and gained a lot of ground very quickly! Then out of nowhere, I noticed a blockage up ahead. There were others stopped and seemed to be patiently waiting to move through the blockage. I, too, had to stop. 

Now, I understand that theoretically, I was still moving forward. At this moment, my mind was in full-on speed and efficiency mode. In the first 10 seconds of standing still on that moving walkway, I was calculating the lost time and honestly contemplating jumping the barrier. 

You see, moving walkways generally move at a slower speed than a natural walking pace, and even when people continue walking after they step on a moving walkway they tend to slow their pace to compensate, thus moving walkways only minimally improve travel times and overall transport capacity. On that particular day, and in my mind, the only way to fully utilize a moving walkway, is to run at full speed. :)

However, even though my frustrations were high, I stayed and waited to get through the jam. Within a few minutes, I came up to the issue causing the jam. Two individuals, both holding two very large suitcase carry-on's (that should have been checked), were standing still in the middle of the moving walkway. People were having to push their way through the two individuals. And no matter how politely or not politely they asked, the two individuals were not moving. 

Moving walkways are commonly used in larger airports, as passengers – often with heavy luggage in tow – typically need to walk considerable distances. Passengers get on a moving walkway because they plan to move forward. Like an automobile, passengers expect to move forward when using a forward moving transportation method. What happens when you are in an automobile and you get stuck in traffic? Most of us get frustrated. We entered the automobile to move forward. We entered the moving walkway to move forward. Any inhibitor to us moving forward created high levels of frustration. At this moment, those two individuals were our inhibitor to moving forward. 

After a few minutes, I was able to get through the jam. While very frustrated, I was able to make my flight that day. 

However, this experience left me with a vivid example of what happens as a continuous improvement culture begins to spread throughout our organizations. Lets imagine for a moment that leadership is fully committed. The vision has been communicated correctly. The organization is stable. Now, those individuals involved in developing a model area, and/or kaizen event, and/or participants in your kaizen promotion team have stepped onto on moving walkway and are ready to move forward at a fast pace. They have a vision for where they are going and see the path to get there. 

With this said, there will always be individuals who are “stuck.” People who cannot get on-board and commit to this "new" way of doing things. People who are disengaged or sometimes actively sabotaging every step of the way. Maybe some of those individuals do feel like they are moving forward toward the vision. Maybe they want to appear as though they are moving forward, but, in reality, they are just standing still. And even still, sometimes, moving much slower than those around them. 

This can create high levels of frustration for those who are ready to move forward at a fast pace. If we aren’t careful, these frustrations can lead to significant struggles. So how do we best support and deploy the spread of a continuous improvement culture and get everyone on board and running in the same direction?

The work to establish a cohesive and engaged team must begin much earlier. 

In the year 1519, Hernán Cortés arrived in the New World with six hundred men and, upon arrival, made history by destroying his ships. This sent a clear message to his men: There is no turning back. Two years later, he succeeded in his conquest of the Aztec empire. 

How committed to change are you? Has the vision been communicated clearly and is all of leadership aligned and 100% committed? The team will know very quickly if leadership is all talk and no action. If Cortés would have arrived in the New World, quickly called an all-company meeting and said, "I am so committed to this conquest that I am going to burn all the ships," but them only burned a few and kept one or two for a "just in case" scenario, what would his people have thought? So when a new leader arrives and calls and all-company meeting and says, "I am so committed to this new vision that I am going to attend every 10 minute daily stand-up meeting and I will be out on the gemba every day for 15 minutes minimum," but then only commits for the first few weeks and then gets caught up in meetings and office time, what kind of message does that send to the team?

For continuous improvement initiatives to be sustained, we need a different leadership system, a different management system. If you don’t, it’s going to fall apart. If you manage the same way, with the same meetings, same metrics; you will get the same behaviors, beliefs, and the same results. Therefore, unless we change the way we manage, we will fail at sustaining our continuous improvement initiatives. If you want to succeed at sustaining your initiatives, then you need to manage differently. Leaders need to spend more time outside their office and conference rooms and more time with their teams at the gemba (the place where the value-add work is being done).

Once they commit to spending more time with their teams at the gemba, leaders can begin by creating a complete dissatisfaction in the status quo. The leadership team should never be comfortable with the status quo. They should ask their teams constantly, “what’s next?” “how can we make that even better?” “how did you improve your work area today?” Organizations should be focused on turning ideas into new and/or improved processes to create, improve, or expand business capabilities. The goal is to create an organization that learns, improves, and innovates permanently. As we develop this constant dissatisfaction with the status quo, we create an enormous organizational capability to generate new ideas and solutions all the time. Leaders must help remove roadblocks and follow up. Always celebrate every improvement. Those people who are "stuck," will either get unstuck really fast and decide to develop and grow with the company, or they may decide to move along to somewhere that allows them to stay stuck.

When the groundwork is laid correctly from the beginning and leadership is committed to a new way of doing things, the forward moving walkway becomes a super highway! The blockage is cleared and the team is free to move forward very fast with improvements. Small, simple improvements, overtime, can result in a massive organization transformation.

“A river cuts through rock, not because of its power, but because of its persistence.” ~James Watkins

Keep It Simple. Keep It Visual. And Continue To Improve.