Why wait until it's critical?

A friend of mine had a tyre blow-out on the motorway. That certainly got his full attention, but he managed to stop safely. He then discovered his car had no spare wheel (only a can of glue – about as useful as a chocolate teapot in this case), so he had to call the AA to recover him to the nearest garage for a new tyre. 

He missed an important meeting.

However, he admitted that the problem could have been fixed earlier that week. The tyre pressure warning light had come on. He had a quick look, everything seemed fine, he was tight on time so just pressed the reset button and carried on his way. Same thing next day… And the next.

Many businesses suffer from the ‘squeaky wheel syndrome’. The term comes from an American proverb (“The squeaky wheel gets the grease”) used to convey the idea that only the most noticeable (or loudest) problems are likely to get attention.  However, businesses with a true Continuous Improvement (CI) culture identify and solve problems early and/or proactively, invariably reducing the impact (time, cost, quality etc.) vs waiting until the situation is critical. Their definitions of a ‘problem’ also change, often shifting further upstream to an ‘unmet expectation’ or an ‘even better if’ improvement idea.

By encouraging the reporting of problems and improvement ideas, and ensuring there are resources to fix locally (or escalate until it is fixed), supportive managers are able to build trust and empower their teams to operate with greater autonomy. Furthermore, measuring how many problems / improvement ideas are reported, and tracking the level of escalation that was required to fix, can be a useful input when considering the maturity of an organisation’s culture. 

Organisations with a strong CI culture also make data-driven decisions. Rather than visually looking at the tyre to determine if it was under-inflated, they would have used a gauge to check the tyre pressure (and operation of the sensor) and seen that there was indeed an early-stage problem that required a fix. 

Moving from a ‘Squeaky Wheel’ to a Continuous Improvement culture does take time and intent, but it is worth it in the long run. 

Especially if your ‘plan B’ is a chocolate teapot.

Do you agree?

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