What is Improvement?

We all know that improvement is about making things better. Since Quality is about making things good, it's natural that they should fit together.

Or is it? Someone might answer back, "If I make something good to start with, why do I have to improve it later? Isn't 'good' actually good enough?"

It's a fair question. Let's discuss it. While we're there, we can also ask, How do you get improvements? And what exactly counts as an improvement in the first place?

The Red Queen's race

The Quality Management Principles—of which Improvement is the fifth—are spelled out in ISO 9000:2015. When it explains the rationale behind improvement, the standard says (in part):

"Improvement is essential for an organization to maintain current levels of performance, …." (2.3.5.2)

Wait, what? Yes, in answer to the person who asked, "Isn't 'good' actually good enough?" the ISO says that you have to keep getting better just to stay in one place. 

By John Tenniel - Public Domain,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14629431

It sounds like the Red Queen's race. You may remember that in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, Alice has a discussion with the Red Queen:

"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."

"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

But that's just a fantasy story! Can it really be true?

In a sense, yes it is. On the one hand, the more you do the same thing the easier it gets to do it. This is the benefit of practice. But over the long haul, things change around you. Prices rise. Supplies recede. New steps have to be added to your process to address new concerns. And competitors start to encroach on your activities. Pretty soon, if you are still producing exactly the same good product that you produced back in the day, you'll find yourself shut out of the market because the world has moved on around you.

So yes, you have to improve regularly just in order to stand still. The Red Queen's race is real.

Is there an improvement process?

Last week we discussed the process approach as a tool for understanding the nature of work. If improvement is mandatory, it would be nice to know how to get it; and defining a process for it would be a big help. Sure enough, ISO 9000:2015 suggests that one of the things you should do is to:

"develop and deploy processes to implement improvement projects throughout the organization." (2.3.5.4)       

I hate to disagree with the ISO, but it's not so easy. There is no uniform methodology that is guaranteed to generate improve­ments, in the same way that there is no process which can guarantee business success. 

Of course there are tools that will help! If there are problems with your existing products (just for example) then solving those will count as an improvement. And there are problem-solving tools (like 8Ds) that will help you do just that. But sometimes what you need is a new idea that will lift you clear out of your current way of doing things. And there is no systematic process on earth which can guarantee that.

Years ago, I saw a blog post from the Michael Toy, called "An Open Letter to Prospective Employers," which made this point with a clarity I cannot hope to excel:

"If you want consistent measurable progress towards a well defined goal, you would be a crazy fool to hire me. If you hire me, you will spend long months wondering why you did, and you will have exploratory conversations with HR about put­ting a performance plan in place, and then there will be this six month period when I will do three things which will trans­form your business for good in ways you could never have imagined."

The best improvements are like that.

What counts as an improvement?

An improvement makes something better. Better for whom? Is it good enough to say that I like it, so it's better for me?

Generally not. The Quality Management Principles interact; you can't apply them in isolation from each other. And remember that the very first Principle is Customer focus. So "improvement" means making things better for your customers.

Sometimes this is hard for organizations to understand. All too often, in fact, you find companies making changes that no customer wanted, purely for internal reasons. Maybe it was so that they could keep their design staff busy. Maybe it was so that they could announce something new in the industry journals, and therefore keep their names in the headlines. Maybe it was because they forgot the difference between features that are cool and features that are useful. Whatever the reason, though, there are far too many organizations who introduce changes that make their products or services more difficult and more forbidding. These organizations have forgotten that they exist in the first place only to serve customers.

Don't copy them. If you introduce an improvement, make it a real improvement. Make it something that your customers rejoice to see.

Bill Maher talks about the phenomenon of "reverse improvement" in this clip here: