Why Your Process Improvements Don't Stick
Studies on Lean and Six Sigma initiatives routinely put failure-to-sustain rates in the 60–90% range.
Six Sigma failure post-mortems keep landing on the same three culprits: poor training, weak buy-in and bad change management.
So let's dissect that.
Poor training: Your training system has to overcome 3 things to work.
1) You have to get people to listen. This only happens if they think they need to.
2) You have to get them to remember. People forget 90% of the information presented only once within 30 days. Spaced repetition is critical.
3) You have to overcome their existing habits which requires not only repetition, but variation in order to create a standing challenge. Structure is critical here because you want both anticipation and a positive relationship with the engagements.
Weak Buy In:
This one means using motivational strategies besides punishment to drive change. It's efficient to build non-punishment motivation drivers directly into your training process. This dramatically reduces leader workload.
Bad Change Management:
The ultimate change management process is to build anticipation of job competence checks, as a habit, into a positively motivated employee. That individual will be able to change faster than you can change your process and will be happy to do so.
But all of this takes a system and a process designed to deliver. This is what 180 OPEX specializes in delivering. We don't just tell you what to do, we implement the system as a service.
What happens when you implement our system to stop process decay?
1) We sit with your teams and try to understand each step of each process that's problematic. As we map these processes, we try to understand every problem that can or does happen, and then we ask how they can be prevented. This process can address hundreds of problems at the same time.
2) We fully expect some process changes will be implied in step 1, so management approves every change.
3) We build those prevention steps into the process and reinforce them with engagements designed to support habit formation for each member of the team.
4) Adherence to processes immediately improves.
5) All those problems stop happening over the course of about 30 days, the world feels more in control, there's less to fight about.
6) Morale improves because the business is experiencing less problems and more positive motivational drivers. We continue to identify remaining problems to help push your organization forward.
7) The process remains stable, new people are trained by the process, and the business never reverts.
8) You'll run out of visible problems. That's when you need Lean. It's designed to help find waste in a stable process, not fix an unstable one. And you'll be able to implement absolutely every change effectively.
Sustainable improvement isn't about implementing the right change once. It's about building a system that keeps the change in place.
That's the system 180 OPEX is designed to build.
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