Hi there, Matts Rehnstrom here, Shaper of Business Excellence. In this video, I’m going to talk about one sure way how you could fail in your improvement work. One way to fail in your improvement work is to have no improvement model at all. Another way to fail is to have several improvement models.
You Need a Road Map to Reach Your Destination
If we’re talking about the first way to fail, I visit a lot of different organizations and I when I come in and help them, I find that they have no model at all guiding them in their improvement work. That is like having no map and going out, driving on the countryside, with small roads leading left and right and up and down. We don’t know where we are.We don’t know where we’re going. So you need to have an improvement model that guides you from a to z through all the steps that you need to do in your improvement work.
Too Many Road Maps and You Will Lose Your Way
Another way to fail is to have several models. If you have several models within your organization, you will find that different people in the organization talk different languages, different dialects.
They talk about improvement, but they don’t have the same process, which is a model to follow when they do with their improvement work. It’s very easy to get caught up in a trench warfare within your organization where people that have one model, they want to fight against using the other models and those with the other models want to fight against their model and so on. Everyone believes that their model is the most important one.
Select One Improvement Model
What you need to do in order to make your improvement work successful is, if you don’t have a model, select a model. Go out, find a model that you believe in and select that for your improvement work.
Select One if You Have Several Improvement Models
Second is if you have several models in your organization, select one of those models and stay with that model.
Or Make Sure the Models Can Coexist
If you have several and you want to keep on having several models, you need to make sure that those models talk to each other so people working with these models understand each other and that you can see that these different models can coexist with each other. Otherwise, you will still have the same confusion as you would without a model or several different models at once.
You Aren’t Stuck with the Model You Choose
Don’t feel if you choose one model your organization will be stuck with that one model forever. As everything else that we do within improvement work, you can pick a model, learn that model, and start working with it. If you don’t find it is good enough, you can either improve the model or you can choose another a model.
It’s not the end of world. If you change from one model to another. The most important thing for you is to have a model because if you don’t have a model, it’s like that drive on the countryside without any map at all.And when you have several models that don’t work well together, that is like driving on that road in the countryside and there’s four people in the car and everyone had their own map and their own opinion of how the landscape is formed. That is a sure way for confusion. And those backseat drivers are going to go crazy because you don’t listen to them and they don’t listen to you.
So select a model or if you want to have several, make them coexist in the organization. Don’t start that trench warfare within the organization fighting over which model is the best. So the model is the key for a successful improvement work.
If you would like to have more free material about how to set up your improvement model, click here to download my free report about how to set up your organization with a model and things that you need to think about when working with your improvement work. Good luck, and then let’s go and shape our businesses to excellence.
