Monday, November 25, 2019

Three Aspects of Culture of Improvement

Business fundamentals are people, process, and technology. Making continuous improvement is the way how organizations should improve themselves. 

Every organization exhibits a culture. Culture is the collective mindset, attitude, and behavior. The departments within the organization have a culture. Anytime people work together for an extended period of time, a culture is formed. It’s the force that guides and directs how people will interact with one another and deal with those beyond their group. To expedite digital transformation, it is important to develop a culture of continuous improvement. Even a very small improvement can leverage a new way of doing things, bring an outside view, and shift the paradigm to get digital ready. Here are three aspects of the culture of improvement.





Acceptance that perfection is impossible, there's always room for improvement
: The culture of continuous improvement means to continue to discover that "there is always a better way." Achieving business excellence is more of a journey than a destination. Continuous improvement is more likely to be sustained if there is a framework and takes a whole systematic approach.

More specifically, making continuous improvement is the path in pursuit of the verb “perfecting,” not for being “perfect.” There is a difference between the noun “perfect” with the implication of a “perfect” entity and the verb “perfecting,” Too little perfectionism leads to a rapid but undesirable endpoint. Too much perfectionism leads to analysis paralysis and no endpoint. A culture of continuous improvement needs to be implemented by systematic processes in pursuing "perfecting." The key is about striking the right balance between opposing forces, each with its own set of pros and cons. It’s also critical to make continuous improvement without losing the big picture, to ensure that the business as a whole is superior to the sum of pieces.

Continuous improvement is by tweaks of things in the old fashion way to bring efficiency: Continuous improvement is often a linear process pointed at creating stable processes for improving business efficiency and increasing productivity. Adapting learning and continuous improvement culture involves gathering data, analysis, defining areas to be improved and a measurement scale for the culture improvement.

In practice, the breadth and depth of business management improvement include - people development (skills training), process optimization organizational structure tuning, workflow streamline, process efficiency, and business effectiveness; technologies or assets already owned need to be centralized and moved out, re-allocated, updated or replaced if needed to optimize “people and process.” The creation and facilitation of a reflective learning environment are critical to a team’s development of “next practice” and continual improvement for the achievement of targets.


A commitment to improvement followed by actions that implement improvement: Making continuous improvement is a mantra to run a progressive digital organization. With the dynamic business environment, change with improvement in mind is a proactive approach that allows for planning and support considerations to be made. 

Therefore, it is much more likely to turn into a smooth and successful collaborative transition. From the talent development and management perspective, having the senior people in operations and technical services incorporate the inputs or outlooks into in-house training programs so that the business knowledge is shared with others who can then try them out and hopefully improve them. Also, to make the collective improvement, helping people adapt to new things in their work environment can be extremely disruptive and if the goals and values are not clear, it will not succeed.

Business fundamentals are people, process, and technology. Making continuous improvement is the way how organizations should improve themselves. Effective business management means understanding every part of the operation and every workflow process, to keep tuning organizational capabilities and capacities through continuous improvement. The goal is to make continuous improvement in business fundamentals and achieving high-performance business results.

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