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By Root 3088 0

(1561–1626), Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), René Descartes (1596–1650), Isaac Newton (1643–1727), John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), and more recently Karl Popper (1902–1994)—that there was a systematic way to challenge and continuously improve our assumptions, knowledge, and methods to analyze, improve, manage, and predict causes and effects within a specific type of system. The scientific method is simply defined as a systematic or iterative method in which a problem or objective is identified, relevant data is gathered, a hypothesis is formulated, and the hypothesis is empirically tested (e.g., through validation of effect-cause-effect predictions) and then improved upon after review of the experimental test results. The scientific method allows scientists to test theory and methods with experimentation and allows them to use insights gained from experimentation to develop new or improved theories or methods.

Some of the most important discoveries to advance our knowledge and methods of CI and auditing of organizational performance have been made by the likes of Taylor, Gilbert, Ford, Shewhart, Deming, Juran, Ohno, and Goldratt, who knowingly or unknowingly simply applied the scientific method to the science of analyzing, improving, managing, and predicting the performance of organizations.

Many of these discoveries capitalized on the importance of reducing overall process time delays and later, the importance of reducing quality defects, process variation, lost time on capacity constraints and overproduction to improve the overall performance of the system. Benjamin Franklin’s famous quote, which he shared with a young tradesman in 1748, “Remember that time is money,” specifically referred to the opportunity cost of wasting time on something that could be done faster, with less defects or that should not have been done at all. Simply stated, slow processes (or ones that contain defects or variation) are expensive processes (George, 2002).

These discoveries resulted in powerful CI methods such as the Toyota Production System (TPS), Lean, Total Quality Management (TQM), Six Sigma, Business Process Reengineering (BPR), and TOC—each with a large reference bank of success stories and “best-practices” that could provide a baseline for auditing (e.g., the ISO 9000 family of standards for auditing TQM systems).

But with such a powerful and tested toolkit of CI and auditing methods, one would expect that the adoption rate of these tools would be very high and that the majority of those who really tried to implement these methods and tools would achieve major jumps in performance compared to past results.

Why Change?

Introduction

Despite the impressive reference bank of successes and the powerful insights of today’s mainstream continuous improvement methods, they all seem to struggle with achieving higher levels of adoption, with sustaining and expanding on initial improvements, and probably most importantly, with finding ways to reduce the significant percentage of failures and wasted scarce resources due to these failures.

This section provides an overview of the analysis for answering the question “Why change?” (the conventional way) by reviewing the typical improvement gaps within many organizations (and individuals), starting with a common improvement challenge and then a literature review to quantify the extent, consequences, and vicious cycle related to the high failure rate of most “improvement” initiatives within private and public sector organizations today.

The Improvement Gap and Challenges

There are many differences between types of organizations and within organizations from the public and private sectors. However, all goal-orientated organizations (and individuals) have two characteristics in common:

1. They are complex systems (many parts and many interdependencies between the parts) that make them difficult to analyze, improve, manage, and predict the impact of change.

2. There is continuous pressure to achieve more (goal units) with less (resources) in less time resulting in conflicts