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The articles below explain how to overcome common barriers to improvement and how industry leaders sustain the gains where others are not able to.
This is based on our work with well-known and award winning organisations. There is much to learn from them. If there are any topics you would like is to add, please get in touch.
For more detailed articles check out our DAK Academy website guide which contains links to videos, articles and downloads.
What Industry Leading Companies do well
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f the roadmap to industry leading performance was simple, everyone would use it but less than 1% of organisations that embark on that journey stay the course. A recent survey provides some insight as to why that is the case.
The research assessed organisational approaches to improvements and found that:
Changing Outlook to Prevent Breakdowns.
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Analysis shows that around 50% of unplanned downtime failures are due to skill and knowledge gaps. Another 30% of failures are caused by poorly defined set up and inspection standards resulting in worn out or damaged parts.
In other words around 80% of causes of unplanned downtime are avoidable but overlooked.
Because of that, actions to prevent breakdowns depend as much on winning hearts and minds as it does on the level of technical competence.
This is not as difficult as it sounds.
A Plan for Future Excellence
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Every year we learn more about how to be better at what we do so capturing those lessons and revisiting assumptions are a useful part of self development.
The ability to reflect on what worked, what didn't work and define what you want to do differently in the future is an essential part of the leadership role of setting direction.
Generating Improvement Pull
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When Paul Akers applied Lean Thinking to his business he removed a lot of waste, simplified processes and saw the business grow steadily but he noticed that he had become the sole driving force behind the improvement process. As long as he was around to initiate ideas or to lead brainstorming sessions or Kaizen they would see progress.
This wasn't what he had seen in exemplar organisations. Those organisations had built a proactive culture where people embrace continuous improvement as part of the routine.
To cut a long story short, he found that two fundamentals were essential to recreate the proactive improvement culture that industry leaders like Toyota had achieved.
Leader Learning Clubs and Change Management
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Even in well run organisations, the "default autopilot mode" is to respond to circumstances as they occur. As humans our innate ability to manage day to day routines on instinct is how humans have learned to adapt to the complexity of the real world.
The downside of being good at dealing with crises when they arise is the failure to resolve underlying weaknesses so the same issues reappear over time.
Our research indicates that around 60% of organisations exist in this "fragile" state where issues resurface, are accepted as inevitable and become invisible but it doesn't have to be like that if....
How To Shape Culture
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A proactive culture can help your organisation become a shining beacon of success, making your life easier, more fun, and without the normal daily friction and fire-fighting.
The outcome is "improvement pull" and conversations about improvement ideas providing leaders with a daily forum to shape outlook and reinforce behaviours.
It is these conversations that provide the vehicle to set expectations and change behaviours but it only works if all leaders are aligned so that the conversations have a consistent message.
Improvement Case Studies for Leadership Teams
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The value of Continuous Improvement is pretty much accepted by all organisations but many improvement processes fail to deliver lasting gains.
A typical example is the first case study below which despite 7 years of applying various improvement tools, failed to deliver significant improvement. They turned that situation around by taking a long hard look at what they wanted from their improvement process and what was needed to deliver that goal. The changes they made accelerated the pace of improvement.
That success was not dependent on adopting sophisticated improvement tools but on leadership steps to:
What Industry Leaders Can Learn from The Numskills
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Growing up I used to love reading the Numskulls cartoon in the Beezer/Beano comic which featured little people inside the head of a cartoon character. Alf and Fred shoved food down the tum hatch. Blinky ran the eye department, brainy sat at computer in the brain department. Nosey was in the Nose department, you get the picture. (Find out more at https://ukcomics.fandom.com/wiki/The_Numskulls)
Much of the cartoon strip humour comes from each Numskull character working as separate entities. That leads to all sorts of unintended comical outcomes. (e.g. Brainy decides to grow hair to keep warm but it grows too long so Blinky can't see and the man falls over).
Unfortunately this sort of silo thinking is something that organisations can be guilty of for example....
Dealing with Skill and Knowledge Gaps
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In our work helping organisations to improve effectiveness, we find that the most common causes of lost performance, defects and waste are front line skill and knowledge gaps.
What are the Risks
Recent research shows that the lack of effective skill development is a reason for people to seek alternative employment.
In addition, government research indicates that around 2/3rds of manufacturing companies don't feel that their skill development process is able to meet business development priorities. In other words skill gaps are a significant inhibitor to organisational growth and operational improvement.
So what skills are missing and what does it take to break out of that situation?
Scaling up Technology Gains
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In the last blog article we covered the idea that change is the only constant and how winning organisations adapt to change and avoid the Manfacturing Whack a Mole game! by adopting 4 principles.
Think of these principles as the first part of a code to a combination padlock. To spring the lock you need additional numbers. Those numbers depend on the nature of the change.
For example, consider the "combination padlock" factors needed for successful adoption of advanced technology based on World Economic Forum Research into the select group of leading manufacturers who are able to deploy advanced manufacturing at scale.
