Following my blog of 18th April I asked you:

* What type of improvement is really necessary for an organisation?

Over 120 of you took the trouble to vote. The answers are in, with:

39% Continuous Improvement: small steps

2% Discontinuous Improvement: big steps

14% Process Improvement: end-to-end

4% Extended Enterprise Improvement

42% All of these

What does this tell us? Well over 80% of you think that small step local improvement should be part of a lean programme, whilst considerably less see lean should be about big step continuous improvement. However, what I see is almost everyone does big step improvement, be it senior management projects or black belt projects. The problem here is that these tend to be imposed on people lower in the organisation and feel like lean is being done to them or PUSHED. This often leads to tissue rejection.

Continuous Improvement and Pull

What I have found is that lean needs to be PULLED by local teams based on a coherent deployment of the needs of the business and customers as well as their needs of the local team to make their jobs easier and to reduce frustration.

Read this other blog about continuous improvement by Prof. Peter Hines