Cultivating a Culture of Continuous Improvement

It can be tempting to think of innovation as a singular, “mama we made it” moment. While intriguing, this notion of breakthrough eureka moments is misleading—most innovation comes from gradual development of ideas over time with continual process improvement.

Cultivating a culture in your organisation where every person - from the intern to the Finance Director -- is empowered to improve workplace processes and and systems can make a tremendous impact on your business.

Here are 5 tips to help encourage a culture of continuous improvement in the workplace:

Eliminate shame and judgment

The biggest blocker to embracing a continuous improvement mindset is the tendency for people to look for problems and assign blame to individuals. The need to figure out who's at fault is a powerful human tendency. If you really want to create a learning culture, you need to push that aside and focus on insights rather than judgment. Setting good ground rules will help keep things focused on learning, not finger-pointing.

Get good at root cause analysis

Dig beneath the surface of the presenting problems that you see at first glance. Ask "why" several times to uncover the underlying source of the problems you've identified. Once you've drilled down, identify the areas that really need to be addressed to fix the problems at the source to create long-term, sustainable improvements.

Distinguish between decisions and outcomes

All businesses have varying levels of uncertainty, which means that not all good decisions lead to good outcomes and not all bad decisions lead to bad outcomes. Luck and chance play a role. Just because you had a bad outcome, don't assume you made the wrong decision.

Commit to improvement and changes

Once you identify areas that need improvement and changes you could make, focus your efforts on a limited and specific set of priorities. Don't spread yourself too thin. Better to get a few things done quickly and completely than to have a long list of partially completed projects.

Make it a regular habit and commitment

The most important thing you need to do to become a true learning-based organisation is to make a habit of reflecting on results and finding insights into future changes. High-performance teams set aside time to run retrospectives and identify the improvements that they will commit to.

Try these few tips and let us know how they’ve worked for you.