Fifty First Dates of Process Improvement
A process without a memory resembles the love story of Lucy & Henry in the movie the 50 First Dates.
Henry sets his heart on romancing Lucy, but Lucy has short-term memory loss; Lucy can't remember anything that happened the day before. So every morning, Henry has to woo her again and has to earn Lucy’s love every day over and over.
A process without a memory resembles the love story of Lucy & Henry in the movie the 50 First Dates.
The lack of process memory plays an important part in every failure. A study by the Clemer group suggests that 50–70 percent of improvement and change endeavors are failing. Another aspect of this high failure rate is that even repeated attempts on the same set of goals fail at very high rates. I think one of the key reasons for these repeated failures is what I call the process amnesia.
Story of Process Amnesia
I didn’t know that I was about to discover a new phenomenon when I decided to be more involved with one of the plants I was responsible for as the COO. This plant had almost two years of working with advisors, mentors, senseis, and black belts of all sorts. But they were still struggling with some basic issues.
As the first action, I asked the plant manager to include me in all the daily and weekly rhythms regardless of the topic. For two weeks, I attended rhythms of every function: maintenance, HR, scheduling, material planning, safety, etc. While shadowing the teams in these meetings, one thing struck me a lot. 95% of the time in these meetings was spent catching up on what had happened since the last meeting 24 hours ago. Thus, meetings were ending without action items and plans.
I think my readers are very smart people, so I jump to the conclusion. See the below figure.
© Saip Eren Yilmaz, 2023
It is so simple, easy, and fast to recover from the process amnesia if you are using MS Teams. Just set up Kanban boards for each tier and rhythm, and institute continual usage & updating of action items and information flow between meetings. MS Teams has a simple-to-use mobile app for frontline usage, and it has great dashboards for tracking performance trail and action logs driving accountability.
This simple tweak magically drives action and yields outcomes on a persistent and progressive basis.
All digital and 24-hour alive.
© Saip Eren Yilmaz, 2023
