Continuous Improvement Culture

Michael, come on, there is no “there” – by definition.
You will know you are living CIC as you see positive movement of your firm’s KPIs. As to discussing those, well too big a topic for a forum post. Plenty of stuff available for you read to determine how to set those.

Micheal,
if you insist, you can set some KPIs as number of CI ideas per person or per team per month or/and saving achieved by team per year due to these ideas.

Michael Herskovitz,
There was an interesting post on here several years ago that went something like this: “We finished continuous improvement a couple years ago. We are looking for the next big thing.”
I am not sure you question makes much more sense. How do you make a decision to use Continuous Improvement Cuture to transform your company when you do not know what a Continuous Improvement Cutlure is? I don’t understand how a person (or worse a leadership team – using the term leadership rather loosly) can make that decision. You would look pretty foolish if you guaranteed lifetime employment, announced that CIC was your strategy and then found out that the first step to CIC was laying off 10% of your workforce (a little extreme to make a point).
Why don’t you ask a different question. I would start with something like “what are our core competancies?” or “what are our strategic products?” or “what support functions are critical to the previous two questions?” Those might be things that you want to continuously improve. Try focusing on a couple things and see if you can get those right and then continuously improve your continuous improvement process by picking a few other things to add to the portfolio.
There is a story about someone asking Deming about instant pudding. You question is basically the same question with updated terminology. When TPS was created do you think anyone ran around asking for the key metrics to build a world class car manufacturing company? I don’t know for sure but I would put a months salary (if I had one) on the fact that they didn’t. I am guessing they probably spent a long time learning their business and figured it out for themselves. This stuff takes work and involvement. If it is something for you to do between herbal tea breaks then you need to try something else.
Just my opinion.
Good luck

I did not ask the question.

I would suggest that KPI’s can be obtained without a CIC (brute force), and that KPI’s could be missed even with CIC (if not set correctly however I admit that this is less feasible).  I have always thought of KPI’s as more of the destination and CIC as the prefered method of transportation.

These attributes can be labeled as “subjective,” however, subjective does not necessarily mean unmeasurable, inconsequential or unimportant. The moment one or more people “sense” a critical absence, the escape becomes as objective as losing a car full of $1000 bills, especially when these escapes occur in patterns or in aggregate.These attributes can be measured in aggregate using surveys, FMEAs, and other tools, however the key is to know how to read the senses of others, know when applied cultural attributes are healthy or not, and prevent bad culture attributes all the time. I believe every six-sigma project needs to be bounded by cultural imperatives such as these, otherwise it risks its sustainability.

A project should not just be “costed” in hard dollars, but with respect to the needs of the supporting culture too. If the project costing is at the exclusion or expense of supporting culture, there is an accounting error at work IMHO, because continuous improvement depends heavily on a supporting culture. Good projects allow themselves to be culturally bounded in the planning stages. This may shave a tad from the projects total theoretical economic potential, but the results will be more bankable in the long run. Good six-sigma requires detailed attention to the supporting culture.

There are some really insightful comments on this thread, but I need to add a few cents here.
A culture (in this context) is the collective beliefs or behaviors of individuals in a group.  It is a stereotype since not all individuals believe the same things or behave the same way.  Consequently any definition of a culture is subject to debate.  Many people believe the US to be a democratic culture.  But not all people vote.  In many locations, most of the people don’t vote.  But then again, if nobody votes, the American system falls apart.  So defining the US as a democratic culture has nothing to do with a KPI of how many people vote, but rather by the systems and structures in place that make its existence as a culture dependent on democracy.Same goes for CI.  KPIs don’t define a CI culture, systems and structures do.  While the definition of a CI culture will always be debatable, the only way to create it is to make the fabric of your organization dependent on it.  It needs to be an integral component of your forecasting, planning, management and execution processes.  It needs to be a component of how work gets done and how people are hired, developed, rewarded and retained.  What you need to do is decide what those processes are and then create the structure that makes your company’s way of doing business dependant on CI.  Ultimately your CI culture will be defined by the beliefs and behaviors of the people in your company.  You can try to measure it and create KPIs but I am not convinced the numbers will tell you much.  What will make the culture evident is the existence of systems that force the culture to exist.

Venerable,
I check in from time to time and read through the topics discussed in an effort to continuously learn from others – I just wanted to state that I truly appreciate your thoughtful, well worded and common sense postings.  You, Brandon, Robert Butler and a few others make returning to the site worthwhile despite the plethora of those who appear to visit solely with the intent of insulting others.  Thanks to all of you

Ven: Culture is much of what you say. However culture is also viewed in the field of organizational behavior as a powerful social system naturally created by the participants themselves to meet participant needs. According to this theory, cultures are processes that are capable of supporting organizational objectives in varying degrees, or resisting them altogether. Pfeiffer referred to culture as “the gap between knowing and doing.” Cultures are unique and highly variable as you indicated, yet they do have universal traits making them manageable, predictable, and improvable. To be effective practitioners we need to understand and respect how certain culture inputs improve or degrade our operating culture’s supportive capability. Juran, Deming and Crosby all subscribed strongly to the basic tenants of this theory, and we should too. To get the needed outputs, we need to engineer our inputs wisely. This is true in all process management, and culture management is no different.

Michael, the answer is here already. Create baselines metrics, decide priorities for improvement, track and graph the metrics. Data is your evidence – put it in pictures; words have far less impact.
Use the Balanced Scorecard to show you are touching all corp. objectives.
IF you have created a continuous improvement program it will be borne out in the data…and will be very easy to demonstrate. Graphs, graphs, graphs…..

My first reply to any post…though I have read many, many messages.
Culture…simply defined is “You get what you tolerate”.
Any method, process, metric, etc. put into place does not, or will not, change a culture.  As I have previously seen in other posts, changing the culture means rewarding and repeating desired behaviors toward a specific goal.  Sometimes the advancement of a metric may mean suboptimizing another part of the system.  Scoreboard metrics, which roll into process metrics, will give an idication of movement in the right direction.  Any unmeasured behavior, which may not uphold the CIC, could thwart any sustainment of the desired culture.
There is no “getting there” in the continuous improvement methodology.  The longer one tries to achieve continuous improvement, the distance to the goal line reveals itself to be a little farther than first realized.
I enjoy reading this and many other discussion. Thanks for letting us all learn together.  Qbob.

Rewards are very important, I agree totally on that, however, rewards are not the most influential factor. Many studies have shown that people are influenced more by risks than by rewards. Many participants view six-sigma as a risk
mode to their jobs and work satisfaction. The double whammy is when both rewards and risks are unfairly allocated, resulting in risks being disproportionately born by the under rewarded. If a BB wanted to do ONE THING to improve their culture, statistically I would say “lower the participant’s risks.” The second thing would be to revisit how all rewards (monetary and non monetary) could be more fairly allocated.

Hi Michael,
I seem to understand what you are looking for. Being in Quality and continuous improvement field for 16 years, I have measured it with a couple of KPIs as follows:
Employee involvement ratio : No of continuous improvement ideas implemented during a certain period / Total number of employees
I have always shown this as a YTD (year to date) measure. For Eg: When one starts measuring for Jan, we had 10 improvements implemented by 10 different persons(need to define what would qualify as a continuous improvement – Generally ones that make the job easier to do, improve customer satisfaction, reduce risk of compliance etc.,) from 100 people in the team, the employee involvement would be at 10%. In feb, if one had another 20 different (not the same as the earlier 10 people) people implemented improvement ideas, then the employee involvement would raise to 30% (10+20)/100 – This 30% is a YTD measure.
The other KPI would be to look at the YTD hard benefits (dollar) realized from continuous improvement activities. This would require structuring all the improvements under one umbrella.
Hope this helps.
SHASHI
 
 
 
 
 

Agree totally.
I would also recommend to Michael to look at the performance appraisals used in the company.  What are the criteria used to assess employee performance? Do any reflect the companie’s desire to have a CIC?  If not, why not? That has to change…If so, get the data.  You can then track it to see if there are any changes over time.  Working with HR is crucial and this is a perfect opportunity to integrate CIC with organizational development.  Imagine that, an integrated system that aligns visions, goals, priorities, reviews, and rewards.
Hope this helps,
Patch

Thank you Shashi,
I too have prescribed these two KPI’s suggested in earlier post of 13th Dec  ( #s of Kaizens/ CQI attempts per employee, and/or the monetary outcomes of such endeavours per month), and that shows the state of alignment towards improvement. However if one wants to monitor the activity quantitatively, then it would be worthwhile using their product. i.e number and Value.
One may counter that this will not spell the ‘Continuous Improvement Performance’ in right terms. But a single improvement, how so ever it may be, can not spell the continuous of Quality culture. Whereas many such not-very-productive /futile attempts may neither be considered up to the mark  nor indicative of a proficient improvement environment.
Priyavrat Thareja http://www.thareja.com