Power and Continuous Improvement

"Left unchecked and unpruned, every company drifts into complexity over time, and the longer an organization has been around, the harder it becomes to locate the good, clear, coherent strategy that once existed inside the riot of organic growth, abandoned ideas, and dead branches. Over time, the strategy becomes an orchard with a hodgepodge of okay trees instead of a single beautiful specimen heavy with fruit.

Ironically, complexity can be hard to let go of because it seems more honest than simplicity. Have you ever heard about a straightforward, easy-to-understand strategy and found yourself skeptical? Have you ever thought, “Surely it can’t be that simple”?..."

This is unashamedly pruned from a piece sent by Austin Church to my Inbox - (And while I can't tag him in here, his stuff is really rather good.)

I've never been a fan of the 'low-hanging fruit' analogy - it reduces humans to vegetative status and implies that effort can be harvested, like apples dropped into a bushel. In my opinion, a person's light should not be hiding there as a matter of principle, let alone be boxed up for counting like so much collateral in a cider press. Light, an under-rated facet of electro-magnetism, is within everyone and it wants to shine, at all times.

You don't get a workplace to buzz with proactivity by cherry-picking people to send on leadership courses. You don't invigorate a workforce by investing thousands in executive coaching or team-building days. You get engagement, and the resultant upsurge in continuous improvement, by involving everyone in the process of cultural advancement.

Austin has a point in that familiarity breeds not only contempt, but an unquantified collection of unkempt trees from which the wood itself may drift entirely out of focus. Nettles and brambles ready and waiting to hurt the unwary can tear at free spirits who seek to modernise approaches, while clusters of tangled, outdated agendas can prevent access to innovation even by the brightest sparks within the confines of an organisation. Burgeoning canopies of old growth (that once was classed as cutting-edge) stifle the sunlight of new ideas, fresh strategies and the energy that comes with invigoration.

Industry has suffered from old-growth syndrome for a long time now, never really finding its feet after sprinting through Industrial Revolution. While machinery and technology charge ahead into modernisation, management systems passed down through generations have clamped themselves to ankles like the veritable ball and chain worn by the slaves who (only just) pre-dated the age of mass-production facilities.

Made in Britain was once the best you could get - unrivalled across so many sectors the applications were hard to count. From pens to porcelain, cars to cameras, we produced the best in the world and nobody thought, in those days, it would ever be any different.

Other countries had other ideas. Deutschland sprung its technic into life and China rolled out copies of everything it could lay its hands on. The USA set its sights on space and Russia - well, Russia did what it does best, coldly going where no-one had dared before.

Whatever they did, transformations were made from opportunities; more transformers then came along of their own accord.

Revolutionising their ways of thinking in raising the next generation, parents are now met with a forest of labels to pin on their children. Losing faith in successive deceptive governments, people are seeking cultural solutions in their places of work. Recognising this tide, some have stepped up to the plate and transformed to accommodate workers looking for more than the wage packet in choosing where to invest their precious time.

But this happens mainly in white-collar sectors. Unwilling to take risks in front of equally constricted peers, industrial leaders have let aeons pass without facing people-centric issues with any serious intention of transformation. Fearful of ridicule and failure, wary even of empowering subordinates, directorships have held fast to phrases such as "If you don't like it, you know where the door is," while the corridors around them echo quietly with, "nothing's going to change around here."

Of course, everything changes all the time whether we like it or not; whether we prune the roses or not, they will grow new formations each summer. Capacity for change is a natural inheritance. While society has awoken to self-actualisation, leadership teams have not helped it on its way via a sustainable ideology. Instead, industry has left guidance to social media; content creators are keen to absorb screen-scrollers on what's supposed to happen in Utopia and what to do when confronted with a toxic workplace.

British industry lost blue-sky thinking and dolphinism just as light was beginning to shine through. At the turn of the Millennium, these buzzwords described what was happening in boardrooms, but without any centralisation of known strategies that worked, enthusiasm for employee engagement vanished before it even managed to break the surface. Rather than step up to record-breaking excellence by energising its people, manufacturing stepped down into data-mining and technological dependence.

With process-led information easier to quantify, 6-Sigma and Lean got ahead of the curve and left 'soft skills', EQ and empathic leadership to go to the dogs. Which it did - and now we're searching for those lost puppies so that people can come home to psychological safety.

We can regain so much ground if we appreciate and nurture what we have. Thousands of skilled people in operational facilities, and many more recently retired, would love something constructive to do given the choice. Educational facilities actively seek collaborations with industry leaders to give STEM students something great to aim for.

There are solutions, always - we just have to be brave enough to find them and committed enough to learn to use them well. There are people willing to blaze trails into uncharted territory in a surety that good things come to those who go seeking them.

Engineering has to stand on its own two feet, regain its pride, believe in itself and start fuelling its employee base with desirable commodities. An Engagement steering group now meets quarterly at academic institutions. You've read this far - why not come and join us? You're clearly interested in the future fortune of British industry and would rather it rose to the challenge than buckled under the weight of its own history.

As a blue-sky thinker, we need you here - to be clear about this, we Need YOU NOW so we can turn discoveries into innovations!

Contact me today - kathy@worldlinetraining.com