Continuous Improvement Mastermind

Continuous Improvement Mastermind is a bold title. This is what we are setting out to create at Chalmers St. Consulting. Operational challenges that we experience are the result of too little time spent thinking and poorly organized thoughts. This is what we are addressing through the CI Mastermind program.

Long ago, Frederick Taylor got industrialists to think very deliberately about how their companies performed work and how to organize work more effectively. The 20th century was full of innovations in methods, management, and automation. Today we can look back and see that our ideas on how we work are much better formed than in the early 20th century. The problem is that even with all the improvements we have made since Frederick Taylor’s time, too often, we leave the “how we work” thinking in the hands of only a few experts. Don’t get me wrong, we continue to need experts to think big and solve challenging operational problems, but this work needs to be done at other levels of the company as well. I see this problem not just as a continuous improvement practitioner, but as a consumer demanding better products and services. Many simple problems can be resolved by the people doing the day to day work. Lean thinkers already know all this, but still struggle to address the problem in practice. Why is this?

From the time we enter elementary school through completion of high school, college, graduate school, etc. we have these elders in our lives who are desperately trying to get us to think. They work hard to get us interested in a topic that is new to us. They train us to think deeply about a problem and to consider solutions and the viability of the solutions. When we leave our time in formal education much of that structure falls away. Why do we have such a hard division between our educational life and our vocational/occupational life? When we reach a certain age do we cease needing to learn? Do we suddenly become enlightened in a way that we self teach? Neither of these are true. For most of us, self teaching is difficult to prioritize. For many of us, myself included, we need coaches, mentors, and role models to encourage thinking and learning. This is the inspiration that helped us create the CI Mastermind program. To build an organization that thinks deeply and solves problems, we need a system of continuous education that holds people accountable, develops their skills, and challenges surface level thought processes.?

This is the challenge that we set out to resolve. A CI Mastermind is the person that will be the critical link inside the company who coaches, mentors, reinforces, and challenges associates to see those tasks that are not producing the intended outcomes, dive deep into the problems, and collaborate at an operational systems level to resolve all of the poor outcomes we experience as consumers of goods and services or as partners in doing business. The CI Mastermind is not just an expert in problem solving; this person is so much more. They are a role model or a sensei helping others learn. They are masters in guiding challenging discussions to a productive end. They are part of the environment where people are free from fear to discuss challenges. This is why we call it CI Mastermind.?

We believe everyone has the power and ability to achieve this with the right support structure around them, with an honest interest in learning, and with time and experience. Our CI Mastermind Program creates the support network for day to day problem solving. We launched this program last September. In future articles, I will share more about our approach and what we are learning as we apply this with our customers.??