The 4C’s of Successful Continuous Improvement Initiatives
INTRODUCTION
Many folks are familiar with the 4C’s, a clever tool used by diamantaires and bemused engagement ring shoppers, to help evaluate a diamond: Cut, Carat, Color, and Clarity. A diamond’s visual performance, its fire and scintillation, results from a combination of the 4C’s. While each component is important, it is the balanced combination of each aspect that enables a diamond to truly shine. These 4C’s aren’t what we’ll be discussing here, however. Here, we’ll be discussing what makes an organization’s continuous improvement (CI) effort successful. The analogy serves as a helpful frame of reference — successful CI efforts, like a diamond, require a balanced combination of multiple elements. While each element is unique and significant, it is the combination, functioning in concert, that creates something truly valuable. So, what are the 4C’s of successful CI initiatives? Let’s dive a little deeper!
CLARITY
We’re not talking about inclusions in a stone, but rather a clearly defined strategic vision for the organization and the continuous improvement effort. When an organization embarks on a CI initiative, the first task which leadership should focus on is defining a clear outcome for the effort. You will hear leaders discuss their vision, mission statements, and a sundry of other seemingly impressive terms. Often, however, the definitions of such terms remain vague, opaque, and largely innocuous. What we are looking to define here is a specific, tangible outcome of the initiative. Success should be readily quantified using universally agreed upon metrics, and there should be no ambiguity as to what constitutes success. A few elements of a strategic vision to keep in mind:
Quantified Impact of Effort: The effort should focus on effecting change on specific metrics. This change can focus on Employee Experience, Customer Experience, Revenue, among several other categories, but the organizational leadership must have a clear focus on where they are looking to effect change. Moreover, the magnitude of the intended effect must be clearly quantified (i.e., Reduce production cost of ‘X’ product by 15%). It’s imperative that the leadership comes to a consensus as to the change they are looking to effect. Often, especially in large organizations, individual leaders will express support for a CI initiative that is not yet clearly defined, viewing the initiative as an opportunity to garner additional resources to further the goals of his/her respective team. Leader A is largely responsible for Customer Net Promoter Scores, and Leader B is largely responsible for Operational Efficiency. Both might raise their voice in support of a vague effort, but each has a different idea as to what the intended outcome should be. You can see the friction that will arise in such a scenario. As such, it’s important to define the effort early, in explicit detail.
Time-bound Parameter: Just like the SMART Framework for goal setting, a CI initiative must be time-bound. Success can be clearly defined (i.e., Reduce production cost of ‘X’ product by 15%), but if there is no deadline by which the organization intends to accomplish the goal, then they have only an inert aspiration. Leaders and teams need a deadline toward which they can drive, something to help maintain momentum, and create just enough pressure to spur creativity. To clarify, there should be a rationale behind this deadline. Arbitrary deadlines create unnecessary stress amongst teams, specifically when they are tight deadlines. Conversely, deadlines in the distant future serve little purpose as their distance from present operations cause them to be an afterthought, and they lose their ability to foster focus and create momentum.
Defined Action: This is how an organization will accomplish the goal. What are the specific actions the organization will take to reach the clearly defined metric set forth previously? Now, here’s an important caveat, this is not for the leadership to solve on its own. We will discuss the importance of this being a collective effort below.
COMMUNICATION
So, leadership has identified a clearly defined target, the intended result of a given CI effort, that is both measurable and time-bound. What’s next? The second C of a successful CI effort is Communication. Here’s an important distinction; communication is the process by which organizational leadership disseminates the rationale behind this newly defined effort. This is not the process by which leadership provides explicit direction. This aspect of a CI effort is another area in which organizations often falter — Leadership will pick a goal, and then go about telling directors, managers, and front-line associates exactly what they should be doing with their time. This approach will work — briefly. Invariably, however, a prescriptive directive given without rationale will breed frustration and confusion amongst teams. So, what are leaders to do? Design a framework by which they will succinctly articulate the goal and rationale behind this newly introduced effort (i.e., “Our goal is to reduce production cost of ‘X’ product by 15% by Q3 so that we may offer the lowest-cost product amongst the top 3 competitors”). Again, there is no directive present in this statement, only a clearly defined goal with an accompanying rationale that is readily understood across an organization. Why not just tell people what to do? We’ll get to that.
COLLABORATION
The third C of successful CI initiatives is Collaboration. The primary goal of collaboration is to leverage the collective intellect of the organization to reach the clearly defined goal most effectively and efficiently. Collaboration must occur across multiple levels, but we’ll highlight a few important ones here:
Leadership: We discussed this previously. At the start of a CI effort, individual business unit leaders must convene and settle upon a specific intended outcome for the effort. Again, this isn’t an opportunity to shoehorn individual projects, goals, or interests into a heavily-resourced improvement effort. This is an opportunity to align all resources toward a specific, unifying outcome.
Directors and Managers: Here’s where things often break down. Traditionally, managers and directors operate in functional silos. Compounding this issue, they often have divergent, if not blatantly competing, priorities. As such, there tends to be little opportunity for team leaders to engage one another in a productive way. Therefore, Clarity becomes integral to success — Directors and Managers need a unifying aim. The other important aspect of Collaboration at this tier is the facilitation of idea discovery from functional teams. Traditionally, managers and directors provide explicit direction to individual team members. Again, this works in the short-term, but ultimately stifles creativity and curtails professional growth of individual team members. One hallmark of successful CI efforts is that Directors and Managers construct their teams and daily operations to promote structured, open dialogue and creative problem-solving rather than providing prescriptive directives. When Managers and Directors take on the role of a coach in lieu of a dictator, creativity and intellectual capacity is liberated for the benefit of the broader organization (this could be another blog post, entirely).
Functional Teams: Like the traditional dynamic discussed above, functional teams often do not collaborate heavily with other teams deemed outside of their respective sphere. For organizations to operate most effectively, structured channels of communication and collaboration between functional groups need to exist — this is not the traditional hierarchical process by which Manager A takes a question from his/her team and relays it to Manager B of another team. This is about fostering an environment within which individual team members feel comfortable and supported to engage others outside of their immediate team to answer questions, brainstorm ideas, and test potential solutions.
CONSISTENCY
The fourth C is consistency. As you might imagine, implementing the first 3C’s successfully is no menial task — doing so takes significant time, planning, and resources. Pragmatically, launching such an effort is so resource-intensive that it cannot be done repeatedly without rapidly depleting both resources and the collective enthusiasm of an organization. Consistency in CI practices will enable sustained success. Organizations must develop frameworks and operational practices that embed CI-principles within the organizational DNA. There are a handful of out-of-the box frameworks that purport to do just this, and we won’t spend time on that here. However, it’s important for organizational leaders to think ahead and determine how they can galvanize a culture of continuous improvement over time. This may take the form of revised incentives, new operational structures, or new performance metrics, among other things. It’s critical to give this aspect significant attention early so that the organization can maintain momentum after the initial CI effort has concluded.
CONCLUSION
So, we know that Clarity (in strategic direction), Communication (across the organization), Collaboration (between functional teams), and Consistency (in operational practices) are the four aspects that underpin successful CI initiatives. Just as in the 4C’s of a diamond, each element is essential, but no element is sufficient on its own — all elements work in concert to engender something of incredible value. So, keep this framework in mind as you embark on your next CI initiative.