Understanding Continuous Improvement - Part 1

It's time we just admitted it. Continuous improvement is one of those things that everyone says they should do, but in reality, very few people actually do do. However, thanks to the retrospective in Scrum, everyone can pretend that they do it just fine, whilst nothing ever actually changes, let alone gets better.

That may sound like a cynical opening to a post, but I really feel like continuous improvement is one of those issues that has seen agile itself get a bad name over the last few years. Business leaders were told things would get better. They paid lots of money for things to get better. Things didn't always get better. In fact, sometimes they even got worse. Why would people continue to spend their money on that?

So what happened to this idea of continuous improvement?

The fundamental issue with continuous improvement is a pretty massive and deep rooted one, yet at the same time is very simple. Improvement means doing something differently from how it was done before. Improvement means change.

Now we all talk about how hard organisational change is, but that conversation tends to get limited to 'how hard it is to get people to adopt a framework' or 'how much people dislike a departmental restructuring'. It gets applied to the big ideas, but rarely the really small ones. Rarely do we talk about how hard it is to get people to change a specific process, or to start doing something new in their day to day role, or to stop doing something they've done for a long time, or even to stop doing something they were told they'd be sacked if they stopped doing.

Yet that is what the topic of improvement is up against every day. It's not the big changes that are hard. Anyone can produce 100+ slide powerpoint decks to make that sort of thing look simple, and because powerpoint rarely changes anything, high level powerpoint based change tricks us into making change look easy. It's the actual changes on the ground, in people's everyday practices, that are the hardest to shift.

The every day bit here is important too, as this is not just one-off change or improvement we're talking about. It's continuous improvement. Basically continuous change. Doing something that we say is incredibly hard to do (change how people act around how they earn money to survive), and trying to do it all the time.

No wonder so few people actually do continuous improvement.

Now the reasons for resistance to change are many, and are well covered in the literature out there already, so I won't go through each of them in turn, but I suspect these reasons show up clearly as symptoms in how continuous improvement is done poorly, and it is around these symptoms at least that I hope to propose some ideas that we can start to tackle.

In tomorrow's post, I'll start to explain how. Do click like or comment on this post to increase your chances of seeing it...