Questioning the Universaility of Continuous Improvement
The notion of 'continuous improvement' has become something of a sacred cow that nobody dares to shoot at.
I realised this a few days ago when I tried to argue against the need for more continuous improvement within my role leading a department in a large, conventional organisation (one with ample room for improvement). My attempt to spark a small debate on the necessity of continuous improvement was met with nothing but blank stares, which has made me notice how much the phrase "continuous improvement" has become a corporate motherhood statement which is not so much about improving as it is about simply 'not being stagnant'.
It is essential to debate entrenched ideas from time to time, even if the only outcome is to renew your commitment to it — at least then you would know that you believe in it.
And I can certainly see how continuous improvement became so untouchable. Both words in the expression are just oozing with overall 'goodness' that's impossible to argue against. You can't question "improvement" because, well, this would out you as someon who is not dedicated to getting better. The same goes for taking a "continuous" approach to it. If you are not improving it continuously you must doing it in a way that's more jerky, stop-start, lumpy, irregular, or inconsistent — which all sound like inferior options to the smooth consistency of continous improvement, right?
But this kind of thinking is far too simplistic. It's perfectly feasible to deviate from 'continuous improvement' without going to its opposite extreme.
The argument I was hoping to mount in my failed thought-starter was that the most common methods of applying the ideas of continuous improvement (i.e. the popularised practices and language we see used today, which are rooted in the Kaizen philosophy) may not suit every type of business. Not only was I convinced that we could try a different approach that would yield bigger improvements, with more velocity, which would result in greater overall improvement over time, but as far as I was concerned, we were already doing it! We only lacked the self-belief to put a different label on it.
We were practicing what I would term "seasonal improvement" instead. Our business couldn't afford to rigidly adhere to the 'textbook' methods of continuous improvement practised elsewhere. It just didn't seem to work for us. Our business was too seasonal. Most of our operations were subject to huge swings and gyrations in both volume and intensity, and by adapting to those conditions — but still being determined to improve — we had evolved a better way of systematically improving that could be better suited to highly seasonal businesses like ours.
What is Seasonal Improvement and how is it different from continuous improvement?
Firstly, continuous improvement has many definitions. The key elements across the different ones seem to be that it is an ongoing effort; it is aimed at improving products, services, or processes; it usually produces incremental changes; after conducting analysis and identifying opportunities to make changes.
Seasonal improvement, on the other hand, retains nearly all of these elements, but rejects the first one (the ongoing nature of the changes). It rejects the notion that all processes should always be open to review, and gives the workers permission to not work on it until the right time, when the most impact can be made. The commitment to never stop improving and never be satisfied is still there, it just recognises that:
there is a time of year when you should simply do the work; and
there is another, non-correlated time of year to work on the work.
In practical terms, it means rather than making potential improvements at any time of year, instead, you should batch up your improvement ideas and capitalise on the natural-but-short windows of opportunity to improve a process by carrying out rapid, targeted reviews — usually right before or after each seasonal peak.
After you've made all the changes you possibly can in a given window of opportunity, you should then leave that area alone until the next window comes along (which you can predict because the activity seasonal, not random). This is the crucial part that I expect newcomers will find hard. Your ability to generate ideas is continuous. You will keep noticing further opportunities for after the window has closed, but you should not act on them straight away. You should simply batch them up for actioning in the next window. This element of having restraint is probably the hardest part to implement.
But why? Why not just implement every idea as it comes to you? Well, consider that all your ideas can be classified as either high-ROI or low-ROI changes. The higher-ROI ideas will obviously have more potential benefit, and/or won't come at as much cost. In seasonal improvement, by concentrating the cost of making changes into a short time of year and implementing them all together, you can reduce costs for all the changes and avoid many of the negative side-effects of continuous improvement, such as change fatigue. This allows you to make a higher volume of changes in a focused burst, potentially yielding more overall benefit, imrpoving the ROI ratio for all your improvement ideas at once.
The rhythm of Seasonal Improvement might look something like the graph below, where your team(s) do review the process and make a flurry of improvements right after that process has peaked each year:
This is the approach to ongoing improvement that I instituted in my department, and the results were fantastic. I'll now use it as a case study here to illustrate in more depth.
A Case Study:
The department I manage operates highly marketised student accommodation in one of the world's top education destinations, Melbourne.
This type of business is highly seasonal, which is the source of a number of overlapping issues for myself and the wider leadership team, which include:
Most of the different functions of the business are highly seasonal; but
the the different functional areas peak at different times of year; and
the workforce is generally not seasonal i.e. people are employed year-round; however
most of the workforce tends to be specialised. For example, it's dififcult to reassign the Facilities Manager to the Marketing department when facilities management is quiet but marketing is busy, and vice versa.
Now, in this example, every month of the year will be characterised by one or two functions in your business that reach its maximum intensity in that month. Below is a list of each month and one area that would be peaking in that month (the reality is more complex than this, but a simple example is better for our purposes):
Jan: Sales Feb: Check-ins/customer service Mar: Transition programming Apr: Academic advising May: Wellbeing/incident management Jun: Finance Jul: Conferences Aug: Systems Sep: Marketing Oct: Career advising Nov: Check-outs/billing Dec: Maintenance |
Let's choose just one seasonal peak from this list to explore in more depth. An intiutive one to choose would be the February check-in period, because most people have experienced a hotel-check in before, so let's go with that.
As a side note: for anyone who hasn't experienced it, this is a more challenging undertaking that it appears on the surface. Most student accommodation providers want to have their bookings expire at the same time if possible, to keep everyone in the building on the same price and the same terms & conditions. This has a lot of benefits, but the downside is that it creates a massive torrent of room turnovers in the chosen period (in this case February). You can find yourself turning over 50-90% of your rooms on the same day, while trying to give everyone amazing service as part of the first or last impression you will make in their customer experience, with barely more than your everyday level of staffing when 1% or less of the building is turning over.
Finally, let's say you have just finished up a challenging peak period (February) where it didn't go as well as it could have, so your team have identified a lot of potential improvements for next time. How would you go about implement the changes?
Let's compare how it might play out under continuous improvement and seasonal improvement:
Using continuous improvement:
In traditional continuous improvement, you create a little bit of 'slack' or 'breathing space' in your operations so people can use this little sliver of discretionary time to work on the work.
In keeping with this idea, you could establish a working group of 5 people who would then invest 30 minutes together each week to improve the check-in processes for next February. If they actually stick to the task, you would certainly see them improve this part of the business! They'd have invested 125 hours in doing this together, which would surely be enough to produce a markedly better set of processes, and you would probably see markedly better results next time around.
However the issue with this approach is that people generally can't stick to this schedule. After a few weeks, it's extremely likely that they would either stop investing the time together, or if they kept up the meeting schedule, they would gradually start using the time for newer, louder, emergent priorities besides fixing your check-in period.
Why is this?
Because in this scenario, eleven other parts of the business will peak before this one peaks again. The first of the other areas to peak is probably going to start before the current one is even finished. After that peak there will be another one, and another one, and another one, and so on.
It's like taking a swim in rough surf. After a wave crashes over you, it feels like ou've barely stood back up again before the next one hits you.
When a wave is crashing over you, it's hard to focus on what you should have done eight waves ago. Image credit Ray Bilcliff
Consider the wave analogy for another moment:
If you are swimming in rough surf, and the waves crashing over you are demanding all your energy and concentration to navigate, then it's really difficult to think too far in the past or future. It's hard to stay focused on how you could have handled Wave #1 better while Wave #2 is bearing down on you. It's even harder to think about potential do-overs for both Waves #1 and #2 while you are facing Wave #3. And by the time you reach Wave #12, you'd trying to divide your attention between it and eleven other waves, at which point I'd be surprised if you can remember much detail about Wave #1 at all.
And that's what will happen when following an unmodified 'textbook' approach to continuous improvement when operating a seasonal business like. In this case, the number of process improvement projects you would have open would be x(n - 1) where 'x' is the number of improvement opportunities identified per peak and 'n' is the number of peaks which have occurred. If you can't action the improvements rapidly enough, you'll open projects at a faster rate than you can complete them and they'll just keep piling up until you feel defeated and overwhelmed. If all these projects have interdependencies (which they often do) you'll experience combinatorial explosion on the number of things you need to be sensitive to when trying to implement so many improvements, and you'll find yourself completely stuck. It's an impossible situation to be in.
Said another way, people find it really hard to care about a peak that was too long ago, or is too far in the future. There's not enough payoff for them. And if you try to force them to about too many things, but only some of those things are the source of pressure right now, they'll either ignore you or get overwhelmed, and they'll ultimatley disengage.
Now let's take a look at how this case study is better managed under seasonal improvement.
Using seasonal improvement?
In seasonal improvement you tackle the same challenge (which was to improve the check in procedures before next February) with a few targeted bursts of activity that takes full advantage of the all-consuming nature of peak periods. Because the area just had such a big impact on the business and a lot of people in it, you treat it's temporary signficance as your window of opportunity to get the most improvements you can done, while people are the most motivated to do so. When they start getting distracted by other functions of the business that have become louder, you should recognise that your window is closing. It's time to complete or neatly pause the improvement projects underway, and focus on benefitting from the new window that's emerging.
After the disappointing February period you would:
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Hopefully you can see from this how it's easy and effective to carry out the substantive improvement work immediately before or after a peak, which is when people care about it the most and when the other demands on their attention are at their lowest.
It's been obvious from my time spent evolving Seasonal Improvement that it doesn't come with a detailed formula, only these steps to follow for each window of opportunity.
Technically, if you followed these steps over multiple seasons, your efforts around any one peak would have two parts: a ramp up phase before the peak to finalise improvements from the last window; as well as the more retrospective use of the window I describe above. To zoom in on what mature Seasonal Improvement looks like around one particular peak/window, it would be something like this:
Advantages of Seasonal Improvement
There are a number of advantages to using Seasonal Improvement over continuous improvement. As I've mentioned above, its main advantage over continuous improvement is that more improvements ultimately get completed and embedded into business operations, but I think there are several others. I'm not certain I've identified them all yet, but as a starting piont, this is what I see as the 'top 3' other advantages to Seasonal Improvement:
Staff motivation and development. Avoid dissapating staff energy and motivation. Capitalises on the feeling of urgency that seasonal peaks and troughs create.
It makes the business more customer-centric. .... more natural to listen to your customers and use their feedback (especially if you are too small or immature to have a Voice of Customer program)
It builds a culture of critical thinking. It puts your teams in the habit of evaluating different functions of the business, especially around crucial periods.
Enablers of Seasonal Improvement
Finally, it's obvious that there are a number of enablers that are needed to introduce Seasonal Improvement and do it well. Some of these include:
A desire to improve. In particular, one that burns strongly enough to look past the safe, established method of continuous improvement and give seasonal improvment a try.
A forward planning process for work allocation which is robust enough to allow your team(s) to identify future windows of opportunity, schedule future work to fit, and stick to the forward plan over time.
Staff who are capable of taking a project management approach to business improvement. That is, they don't need supervisors to organise the work into small, regular milestones to keep them on track.
A culture of trust. In a large organisation where everyone is trying to please everyone, it takes courage to put potential improvements aside and say 'we'll come back to that in eight months' (or whatever the right time frame is). Often, when you become aware of a problem, it feels like you need an answer for what you are doing about it right now. A side effect of this is that it also feels like you have to ignore diminishing returns when you experience them. When following Seasonal Improvement, team members need to be able to back each other up and stand by the group's prioritisation.
Final thoughts
In the realm of process improvement, figuring out you actually need to do to generate improvements is driven by the nature of the thing you are trying to improve much more than it is driven by theory.
In a similar vein, Seasonal Improvement doesn't help you identify the improvements themselves, it offers an implementation rhythm that works within the natural cyclical pattern of business activity and staff motivation so you can realise more benefits over time.
If the concept of Seasonal Improvement could speak, it would say "lean into the seasonality of your business and make it work for you".
Cover image by Pixaby.
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