Before getting deeper into this thought, let’s first be clear on ‘recreational improvement’. Recreational improvement is improvement without a goal in mind and/or one which may not impact business performance. An example may be reducing the cycle time of a task/operation that isn’t the constraint in the process of which it is part. The thought of ‘what can we improve versus what do we need to improve?’ also comes into play strongly here.
The question being posed in this news item is ‘what else might need to be established before asking this question?’ To be able to answer the question of what’s getting in the way of doing your job really well, we need to be very and commonly clear on what the ‘job being done really well’ actually looks like. So might this be the first step?
1. First describe ‘doing the job really well’.
This should bring work standards (clearly defined good/normal) into play. To what extent does the response match the content of existing work standards that contain quality and safety parameters of the work and a description of what needs to be happening to deliver them in an agreed time?
Not wishing to overcomplicate getting to the point, might the second step be:
2. How is ‘really well’ being measured?
Is it Right First Time quality. In all cases it would be right to assume without risk of injury. Is it the time taken to complete the job?
Now we’ve considered 1) and 2) above, i.e. ‘really well’ is clear, we’re in a great position to get real value from now asking the question of ‘what’s getting in the way of doing your job really well that we can do something about?’
Maybe there’s still a danger of the question being too broad. Perhaps the focus can be narrowed to one of the elements that came up in 2) i.e. quality, safety or time. Or further narrowed by directing attention toward a certain task within ‘your job’. No matter how wide or narrow, the principles above will remain.
In our previous news item (‘Chapter 1’) Oscar mentioned the Section Leaders action at our intensive pig farming client. When he was last there the ideas from 4 workers had been put into practice except one. (The Section Leader said he himself was holding that one up.) On reflection Oscar feels he was lucky as he made an assumption that what’s noted above was already covered. The assumption seems to have been correct, but it was risky. He’s now going to ask two other Section Leaders to do what’s noted above, and we’ll see what happens.