“Eight Steps to Sustain Change”

John Schultz

Quality Progress

November 2007, pp. 25-31

Much has been written about problem solving and making improvements. This article focuses on the crucial aspect of implementation and minimizing resistance to change.

Three major sources of resistance to change are identified:

• Doubt about the causes and consequences of the proposed improvement
• Concern over the loss of existing benefits
• Realization that the proposed improvement is flawed

Eight action steps are proposed for implementing and securing process improvements:

1. Define the need and necessity for making improvements—Some possible methods are:
   • Benchmark shortcomings against competitors or leaders in the organization’s market
   • Document and display information about complaints from customers, clients, and stakeholders
   • Document and display data related to rejects, rework, scrap, or failures of process control
   • Identify all sources of waste
   • Expose unnecessary spending and use of resources
   • Explain the benefits that will be derived from the change
2. Create and communicate a unifying purpose—The statement of the purpose should:
   • Be brief and well-focused so it can be easily communicated
   • Convey a picture of the future or desired state
   • Say something that appeals to both stakeholders and customers
   • Be realistic, so the purpose appears achievable
3. Identify formal and informal work alliances and ensure their participation—Support can be secured by:
   • Communicating with groups impacted by the change, and encouraging their input
   • Holding an informational meeting for work groups and stakeholders to review the purpose, answer questions, and invite input
   • Engaging in open, fair, and reliable management behavior
   • Looking for opportunities for informal leaders and other stakeholders to participate in the change process
   • Showing appreciation for work groups and stakeholders, and letting them know how they can support the project
4. Create a plan for action—Most plans should contain:
   • Identification of potential barriers to implementation
   • Requirements for necessary equipment, material, people, and training
   • Steps that map out tasks needed to complete the change process
   • Time estimates and deadlines for tasks
   • Assignment of responsibility for each task
5. Empower people to take action—Activities that support empowerment are:
   • Provide training to ensure skills are sufficient for the new environment
   • Provide mechanisms to deal with injustices and provide clout to deal with entrenched power structures
   • Ensure that decisions made by work groups are not reversed without member consultation and consent
   • Give concrete implementation responsibility to informal leaders and process operators
6. Create opportunities for small, meaningful accomplishments—Success in small improvements provides confidence and reduces resistance.
7. Expand the accomplishments and complete the unfinished change activities—Some activities that help do this are:
   • Managers and supervisors leading by example and exemplifying how the new way will work
   • Staying the course, but being flexible enough to make adjustments as needed
   • Redesign formal and informal structures, including communication processes, so they are compatible with new objectives
   • Redesign individual work activities so they support the change
   • Acting as a mentor or coach, but allowing people the opportunity to try out new skills and working relationships
8. Reinforce the new approach—Some ways to lock the new approach in place are:
   • Acknowledge and celebrate the accomplishments and hard work of all supporters and stake holders
   • Continue to monitor and measure system outputs for efficiency and quality
   • Continue to monitor system decision making and how people relate to each other
   • Initiate problem solving if outputs or behaviors fall below acceptable expectations
   • Acknowledge and reward those who continue to ensure system performance and supportive relationships

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“Too Much of a Good Thing? Quality as an Impediment to Innovation”

Robert Cole and Tsuyoshi Matsumiya

California Management Review

Fall 2007, pp. 77-93

The authors of this article argue that “most of the empirical research purporting to show that quality improvement is consistent with innovation turns out to focus on incremental innovation.” They examine three cases of industries characterized by radical/disruptive technological and market challenges in Japan. In these cases, the quality improvement cultures of the companies in question led to a number of noncompetitive responses to the challenges, including:

• A strong quality improvement culture may lead a firm to be unresponsive to technology and market developments that shift demand to reduced quality requirements. This type of culture can lead to locking in quality requirements too early or becoming risk-averse when evaluating the potential of new products or materials. They may become “prisoners” of their quality reputations.
• A strong quality improvement culture with a focus on user-led innovation for current customers may blind firms to new technologies and product features that would be attractive in new markets.

Though some companies may be content to concede the introduction of radical innovation to others, others still wish to have “ambidextrous” capabilities. Some possibilities include:

• Using subsidiaries, or developing separate brands, for developing more basic products for new markets.
• Making stronger use of beta testing (just prior to mass production and distribution) as a way to ease into markets earlier without abandoning high quality standards.
• Pursuing an approach that changes the focus of the quality attributes that are emphasized.

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“Measurement Conundrums”

Jim Huntzinger and Robert Hall

Target

2007, Issue 4, pp. 16-22 (available from www.ame.org)

This article makes the case that financial controls inhibit lean operations and kaizen improvement. Developing or modifying a performance measurement system presents the following challenges:

• Structuring performance measures consistent with physical operations and needs of customers
• Measuring predictive activity, not just results
• Deciding on a “vital few” overall performance measures that will unify effort
• Deciding who monitors performance measures and how frequently

The authors recommend that process learning measurements are the best performance indicators to use. Managers should focus on whether the workforce is doing the things that are predictors of good results, as opposed to just retroactive measures of results that do not take into account whether the right things were done or not: “Doing this remodels the organization into a learning work culture, and regular process improvement is an outcome.”

Some of the indicators of progress made in learning to improve processes are:

• Cross-training status
• Participation in group problem solving activities
• Number of projects completed
• Number of individual suggestions made and implemented
• Number of changes in standard work

The authors conclude: “Effective performance measures let us take corrective action, or let us compare and contrast options to make more thoughtful decisions than would be possible without them. Although performance measures are preferably kept simple, interpreting them requires training and experience. Organizations must develop all their people to use them.”

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Bases for Measured Change

John McNeil, GP
 

Shultz addresses the widespread resistance to change. His well-constructed solution is to communicate a clear justification for the change, engage and empower the affected, create plans that allow for incremental successes, and lock down new approaches and processes through the plan-do-check-act cycle. Are these actions enough? Our experience with clients leads us to believe that they are necessary but not sufficient. A change support infrastructure must be in place and the management culture must support and be supported by both the actions system and the change infrastructure.

Actions

How can we be sure when Shultz’s actions are necessary and whether they are applied and successful? Any change initiative will provoke some degree of resistance and so one can argue that planning and communication; engagement and empowerment and expansion and reinforcement should be continuous and pervasive. Application of his recommendations will eventually result in clarity over the causes and consequences of the proposed improvement, confidence in the retention of existing benefits commitment to the proposed improvement. But these things will take time and are hard to link to the actions taken.

Infrastructure

Successful organizations need an infrastructure to support change. Some aspects of this can be facilitated by computer systems, and in fact many organizations rely too deeply on computer packages to meet the need for enabling information processes.

Purpose-Driven Meetings

In too many organizations, meetings are unstructured and produce no measurable outcomes. Meetings abound for the purposes of disseminating information, gaining compliance and gathering opinions. While necessary, these functions can be covered by other, more efficient means than gathering 15 people in a conference room. The best meetings have the purpose of moving projects forward, have a structured agenda, and well organized participation. They produce concrete action items that engender real time-bound obligation on the part of their designees.

"To-Do"s That Are Done

Action items should be bounded in number, agreed to by the obliged parties, committed to and measured for timely completion. This is often not the case and many organizations lack the information systems needed to comply. Purpose-made computer systems or Microsoft Office are fine vehicles for ensuring that do’s get done, but sticky notes and whiteboard charts will also suffice.

Measurement-Driven Culture

Project status and progress and action item success are only part of a larger culture of living by measurement. Huntzinger and Hall point out that creating and living by a focused, relevant set of predictive measures is not only difficult but runs counter to many financially-oriented cultures and systems. Developing an infrastructure to support this is harder still, but again can be accomplished by simple handwritten public charts almost as well as by complex programs or interlinked systems of spreadsheets (which often remain inscrutable to all but their authors).

Accurate Data

Of course measures that are not accurate, that are too aggregated or disaggregated or not timely will lead to badly directed actions. The best systems are no guarantee of accurate data.

Information Repository and Retrieval Mechanisms

Data alone can overwhelm us; we need patterns and stories created from the data and then the means to retrieve and recall those patterns and stories when applicable. Computers and systems can help us here, but social networks and cultures of storytelling are usually far more critical.

Management

Patrick Lencioni, in his recent fable/novel (The Three Signs of a Miserable Job; Jossey Bass, 2007), shows managers how to get the most out of the people in their organizations. He shows that managers have a three-part obligation to their employees. They must give employees a tangible, measurable means for assessing their success or failure so that they can see that they are dong a good job or gauge their progress or level of contribution. They must show employees how their work makes a difference to others, so that they can understand in turn their relevance to the enterprise. And they must take a real interest in their employees so that they know that their boss and fellow workers know who they are and that they are cared about.

This human side to management is another essential component of overcoming resistance to change, and complements the more mechanical actions listed above.

Personalities

Many managers are poorly equipped in practice to create the necessary impact on the emotional, financial and physical needs of their employees to enable true change. This is sometimes due to the very skills that made them excel as functional employees and led to their selection as leaders. Marshall Goldsmith provides excellent guidance in his many books on how to detect and overcome the outsized personality traits that produce shortfalls in so many leaders. Chief among these winning-but-crippling flaws is the need to win at all costs and in all situations—when it matters, when it doesn’t and when it is totally beside the point.

These flaws can be overcome by directed coaching. Marshall recommends teaming with a mutual coach to reach directed goals. In this way managers can improve their effectiveness, execute appropriate management, leverage the appropriate infrastructure and finally drive actions for change.

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