As we have explored over the last few months, it is one thing to create an improvement and a whole other thing to sustain improvement. Sustaining improvement requires clarity in roles from top management through middle management. It requires many structures and techniques. It requires a culture that backs this up and supports the organization’s ongoing search for continuous improvements. Yet, underlying all of this is a simple but challenging component that can be an obstacle to sustained improvement. Basic habits and the deliberate establishment of routine ensures sustained improvement.
First, I will share my thoughts on habits. It is important to note that habits are both good and bad. A good habit might be going to sleep at the same time every night and waking up at roughly the same time every morning. There is a lot written about sleep hygiene and this type of habit is frequently noted as good. Alternatively, a bad habit might be biting your nails, damaging your teeth to the ire of your dentist.
It is important to note that something becomes a habit when you no longer have to think about it. When you do not have to expend mental energy and the behavior becomes a reflex. I remember taking a flight lesson for the first time. When the wheels of the plane came off the ground, my brain went into overdrive. Nothing about that experience was practiced and routine. My mind was receiving infinite new sensations and things to consider. The instructor had to give me many directions and take care of all sorts of instrumentation as I was completely consumed with trying to understand the basic controls of the plane. Alternatively, on the drive home from the airport all of my driving habits came completely naturally. So much so, that I could reflect on the flying experience with ease while I casually drove home. This is the power of habits. They free our minds so that we can do higher order thinking and spend less time consumed with the minutiae of daily activities. Hopefully you can start to see why this is so crucial to sustaining improvement. Habits allow us to simplify our work so that we can think about improvement. Good habits create the time needed to do improvement work.
Let’s get a bit deeper into the idea of good habits versus bad habits. I picked the two examples earlier because I believe they are typical of what we experience regularly. The bad habit, biting your nails, (which I am often guilty of) kind of emerges organically. I never woke up one morning and planned to start biting my nails. I did not think, hey I can save money and not buy nail clippers by using my teeth! Worse, it is a habit that is hard to break. I catch myself biting my nails when my mind is drifting to other thoughts. If I ever stop biting my nails it will have to be through a very deliberate action to break the bad habit. Alternatively, my good habit for example, maintaining a regular sleep schedule was a very deliberate activity that was instilled in me by my parents when I was young. I had a regular bed time and regular wake up time. This was to be sure I made it out the door to school with enough time to make my lunch! It was a habit that I lost while in college, but regained when I started my career. In fact, my end of day and beginning of day habits are designed routines that I only vary for the purpose of testing new ideas. Does that sound familiar? I hope it sounds like what you know of improving standard work.
The big point here is that only good habits truly free our mind of the mundane so that we can work on improvement. Bad habits do not. The unfortunate challenge is that good habits typically are very deliberately created through establishing specific routines. While bad habits tend to be a bit more organic and thoughtless in nature. Successfully sustaining improvement is the result of thoughtful and deliberate creation of good habits.
The specific routines that I believe are crucial to establishing the good habits necessary for sustaining improvement are detailed in the newsletter on “Building a Culture of Discipline.” As I often say, they are easy to understand, but hard to do. This is because bad habits, biting my nails, or in the workplace, leaving the tool on my bench rather than putting it back in the tool box, or using sloppy non standard nomenclature to name a shared file are all easy to do. While good habits, maintaining my sleep schedule, or in the workplace, cleaning up the work area at the end of the shift, or updating my leader standard work tasks, or taking the time to look up the standard nomenclature used for file sharing all take extra effort and are easy to lose.
Now I cannot explain why this is and I would love to hear from anyone that might disagree, but this is the truth that I have observed both in the workplace and in my personal life. Our job in continuous improvement is to recognize the uphill battle and ensure that as we deploy a new routine that we have defined the actions that will allow us to sustain the routine. This is truly what we mean when we talk about controlling the process. We have a defined and documented routine and we check that routine frequently. In fact, the phrase that I have heard and I like is “check the check.” It is a recognition of our bad habit versus good habit problem. Without a check the bad habit wins. Without a check of the check the routine is not sustained long enough to become a good habit.
In practice this comes down to a lot of very essential administrative tasks. Yes, sadly the nature of process control is that we have to slow down, document, and check against the document. It is tedious at times but remember that maintaining a standard is a promise. If we are going to have integrity to high standards then we have to accept this nature and build the check activities that reinforce good habits. Without that commitment it is a waste to even get started on improvement as it will eventually fall apart and revert back to old ways. This is the only way to ensure that improvement is sustained.