3 Simple Things Continuous Improvement Leaders Can Leverage for Greater Success

Although there are success stories to be found, numerous articles in the past year alone continue to highlight the high failure rate of continuous improvement initiatives like lean, six sigma, agile, and the like (70%).

But here are three things continuous improvement leaders could leverage for better outcomes.

1. Learn and leverage the “natural strategy” approach. Leveraging this in yourself and employees will not only increase employee engagement, it will increase the success rate too. Not only that, if you understand the natural strategy process, you’ll be able to align your efforts more easily to the overall strategies of the organization.
2. Learn and understand the basic idea to market process. All value is created the same way regardless of whether it’s a new product, new marketing promotion, or a continuous improvement project. Value is created when someone understands a situation, generates an insight, turns the insight into a viable concept, develops that concept into a solution, and then puts the solution to work (i.e., commercializes it). Understanding this process will get more ideas actually implemented.
3. Understand how to position your projects. Whether it’s a new product or a continuous improvement project, somebody is going to have to “buy” it. Research has shown that we all make our decisions in the emotional part of the brain, regardless of who we are or what the decision is. So, if you want your project to “sell”, it behooves you to understand how to position your idea to not only appeal on it’s merits but also how to create emotional appeal so the “buyer” is more inclined to “buy”.

You might be the leading expert in continuous improvement in your business, industry, or even country but unless you expand your capabilities to include a working knowledge of strategy, new product development, and marketing, you may continue to struggle. Thankfully, the road to greater success isn’t so hard to travel.

If you would like to talk further about how you or your organization can learn about these things, contact me by going here.