Continual Improvement - What is CI and what is CI not?

I don't know about the 45 degree slope, , but I've seen this also, and as long as the trend line is trending in a favorable direction (depending on what you are trending), you have "continual" not "necessarily continuous improvement.

Excellent way to rapidly review measureables at MR meetings also. . . quick glance tells the story.

Thinking about Continuous improvement in relation to Continual improvement!
Depending on your business environment: The word Continuous suggests permanency and, the word Continual suggests frequency.
What does the group think???
Wallace.

WALLACE said:

Thinking about Continuous improvement in relation to Continual improvement!
Depending on your business environment: The word Continuous suggests permanency and, the word Continual suggests frequency.
What does the group think???
Wallace.

Click to expand...

My take is that continuous is viewed as a ramp - a continuous slope, continuous ongoing change. I prefer continual, which is allowed to be discontinuous, like a stairway. You make a change, wait (at least briefly) and study to see its effect or lack of effect, make another change, wait and study to see its effect, etc etc and etc. aka PDSA if you develop this further.

I believe people don't do well in an environment of continuous change, you start seeing that deer in a headlight looks, the "don't just stand there do something" tampering with processes.

Steve Prevette said:

My take is that continuous is viewed as a ramp - a continuous slope, continuous ongoing change. I prefer continual, which is allowed to be discontinuous, like a stairway. You make a change, wait (at least briefly) and study to see its effect or lack of effect, make another change, wait and study to see its effect, etc etc and etc. aka PDSA if you develop this further.

Click to expand...

I agree steve
The Continual approach does indeed align well with the PDSA approach to process improvement. The allowance for a study of the process measure regarding, deciding appropriate actions is indeed needed.
Would you agree that modern management methods for the most part practice the Continuous approach (By nature), thus infusing an MBO environment and intentionaly putting the cart before the horse?
Just my thoughts.
Wallace.

Just realized, I'm kinda repeating what Rob said.
Hoping though to, dig deeper and find a correlation between Continuous and Continual in relation to modern management practices.
Wallace.

I agree totally with Bob and Steve . . .

WALLACE said:

Would you agree that modern management methods for the most part practice the Continuous approach (By nature), thus infusing an MBO environment and intentionaly putting the cart before the horse?
Just my thoughts.
Wallace.

Click to expand...

Depends on your operational definition of "modern management methods" .

It is interesting, if you do look at many business books, and when you look at data analysis, they tend make their examples of a "trend" as a smooth increasing ramp. My experience is change is indeed discontinuous, and is a series of stair steps.

In improvement (and PDSA), where I would say the cart gets before the horse is that during the planning for the change the planners make an estimate of the expected impact of the change. Now, this is indeed necessary. I ought to have some basis to evaluate candidate changes, and be able to choose the one with the highest expected bang for the buck. But when that estimate of the change now becomes an MBO goal, or worst, some engineered standard (theoretical capacity of the equipment) is chosen as the criteria between success and failure, then we have problems.

The continual change model allows us to improve in steps. Probably a worthwhile discussion is not the difference between continual and continuous, but the interplay between continual (PDSA) change, and drastic discarding of old processes and replacement with a new "clean slate" process (Reengineering, and/or the Tom Peters "destruction imperative"). The difference between somewhat discontinuous and massively discontinuous.

Steve,
Have you ever came across, a statistical measure that reveals a correlation between the slope of continuous and the staired increments of Continual?
Wallace.

WALLACE said:

Steve,
Have you ever came across, a statistical measure that reveals a correlation between the slope of continuous and the staired increments of Continual?
Wallace.

Click to expand...

I'm not too sure what would be such a correlation measure, but I can state on empirical experience with more than a 1,000 control charts per month that it is more common to see sharp shifts in performance, moving from plateau to plateau (and stable time interval to a new stable time interval) rather than periods of time with ramping data between plateaus. I'd guess it is about 90% of the time when there is a change the transition in data takes less than a month.

I would say that the theory behind this is that we indeed make a change to a process, once the change takes hold (the workers out there really start doing the new way) there is a step change in performance rather than a sloping change. Then we make the next change, etc.

Steve Prevette said:

I'm not too sure what would be such a correlation measure, but I can state on empirical experience with more than a 1,000 control charts per month that it is more common to see sharp shifts in performance, moving from plateau to plateau (and stable time interval to a new stable time interval) rather than periods of time with ramping data between plateaus. I'd guess it is about 90% of the time when there is a change the transition in data takes less than a month.

I would say that the theory behind this is that we indeed make a change to a process, once the change takes hold (the workers out there really start doing the new way) there is a step change in performance rather than a sloping change. Then we make the next change, etc.

Click to expand...

Gee Steve. . . looks like a new thread germinating. . . possibly the American way of Break-through technology vs. Incremental Improvement. Plateauing vs. step or slope.