Are You Content with the Status Quo?

In my home state of Michigan, we have the luxury of a national landmark ranked as a Top 10 U.S. Island by TripAdvisor and USA Today. My family has been visiting and enjoying the simple life of Mackinac Island for years. No cars. No chain hotels. Just world-famous Mackinac Island Fudge, historic Fort Mackinac, unique shopping, and diverse dining in a place that seems to be stuck in the past. I still remember my first visit to the island and my first horse-drawn carriage ride. Without cars on the island, they only transportation from point A to point B is by horse or by bicycle.  

The earliest form of a horse-drawn carriage was the chariot in Mesopotamia around 3,000 BC. It was nothing more than a two-wheeled basin for a couple of people and pulled by one or two horses. It was light and quick and the favored vehicle for warfare with Egyptians. Carriages progressed over the years and eventually became the sole transportation method for the wealthy and elite. Why don’t we still use this form of transportation? A horse-drawn carriage will get us from point A to point B; isn’t that the same purpose an automobile holds? So why did we change? 

People like Leonardo da Vinci, Simon Steven, Nicholas-Joseph Cugnot, Karl Benz, and Henry Ford were not content with the horse-drawn carriage. They believed there could be a faster way to get from point A to point B. In the 1500's, Leonardo da Vinci had sketched a mechanized cart without horses to move it. According to General Motors, Simon Steven of Holland build a horseless chariot, propelled by the wind, in 1600 based on “sailing chariots” from China. Nicholas-Joseph Cugnot, a Frenchman, built a self-propelled vehicle with a steam engine in 1769. And finally, in 1886, Karl Benz patented the three-wheeled Motor Car, known as the "Motorwagen." It was the first true, modern automobile. Benz eventually built a car company that still exists today as the Daimler Group. While Henry Ford did not invent the automobile, he developed and manufactured the first automobile that many middle-class Americans could afford. Ford changed the way of life for many people with his vision to make owning a car both practical and affordable. 

Every day new ideas are generated all over the world. New products are created. New methods are executed. So many people are looking at problems in different ways and coming up with new solutions, offering a never-ending stream of value to the companies they work for.

However, this is not the case everywhere. Some companies are struggling to change and improve. They are struggling to create excitement and energy within their teams around the idea of change. They seem to be content with the status quo. Is this dangerous? The answer is Yes....and No.

Stability First!

The status quo is defined as the current or existing state or condition. In plain English, it is the existing situation today. A discontentment with the status quo is why we have the automobile today. Taichi Ohno said, “Progress cannot be generated when we are satisfied with existing situations.” However, Ohno also said, “Without standards, there can be no kaizen.” In this second statement, he meant that we must embrace the status quo by standardizing our processes. Do these statements seem a little contradictory of each other? Often, I hear people struggle with the topic of discontentment and standardization. Let me explain.

How will you ever really know that you are getting better if you have no idea where you are starting? Short term stability is a good thing. It locks in quality, and makes an operation predictable. Many companies live in a state of chaos and instability. Many organizations try to begin improving while still in this state with the hopes of making things better. The instability of their operations and leadership causes things to fall apart.  

If your operation is in total chaos, then you need to stabilize before you can improve. Stability is necessary in any transformation process. When it comes to stability, we are aiming for low variation and high quality. So how do we create low variation? Standards. If everyone is doing things differently, then there will be high variation and a greater potential for chaos. When we create a standard way of doing things, train our team to the standard, and establish accountability to those standards, the result is low variation and high quality.

As a new Operations Manager, I learned the company had 6 different plant managers within the previous 5 years. Each time a new plant manager would assume leadership, he/she would implement their own way of doing things. Each time, the new leader would strip away all remnants of the past plant manager and erect new communication methods, data collection methods, equipment run standards, etc. The environment was full of high variation and quality incidents were the norm.

You need to begin by stabilizing your operations, leadership, and processes. Begin by establishing your current best way of doing things. Now, work together to analyze the current process, make any necessary improvements and document the new standard work. Those people closest to the work should be the ones creating the standard work. Make it visual and post it at the place where the work is being done. Don’t forget to audit regularly to assure compliance to the new standards. 

Let’s imagine now that you have created stability and your current output is top notch, is that enough? Other companies are racing to catch up and pass you. Standing still, in effect, is the same as moving backwards.For some organizations, creating a dissatisfaction with the current state is easy. Maybe your business is not performing well, and you are losing sales? Or maybe you are not fulfilling your mission? In these cases, it would be easy to communicate and create alignment around ‘why’ we need to change. However, it is not always this easy.  

Develop Dissatisfaction with the Status Quo 

The company I worked for was doing over $10 billion dollars in sales annually. Unfortunately, because the company was doing so well, this resulted in minimal discussions around expenses. Teams were content with the status quo and wasteful practices became acceptable because they were making so much money. There was a time I was introduced to a temporary employee working on a production line. He was checking 100% of the parts on the line for a printed bar code. If the bar code was not there, he was to place the part in a rework tote. The leader told me they had a customer complaint last year and this was their response to assure the customer did not get another part without a bar code. I moved further up the production line to the bar coder and found a broken vision system in place just after the bar coder. I asked the leader about the vision system. His response was, “It was easier for us to put a person on the line to check than to fix the vision system.” I said, “do you know how much that person is costing you in comparison to fixing the vision system?” He responded, “why should we care? We make enough money to not worry about these things.” 

The leadership team should never be comfortable with the status quo. They should ask their teams constantly, “what’s next?” “how can we make that even better?” “how did you improve your work area today?”

One strategy is to remind your teams about their external competitors. Most humans are competitive by nature and when they know their competitors are improving, they will want to follow suit. In competitive markets, companies must continue to improve and evolve or they will cease to exist. To maintain market share, companies must improve with the market. If they want to gain market share, they must improve and innovate even faster. The market always wants more.  

Don’t be afraid to make things fun by using forms of “totems” in your work areas. Reminders of external competition like comparison charts or even something fun like a large banner in the break room with a competitor’s logo in the center and the words, “[Insert Competitors Name] is improving. Are We?” This can be a good reminder that we cannot become content. Healthy internal competition can create dissatisfaction with the status quo, and a golden toilet seat will seal the deal!

Use Simple Charts to Communicate the Need for Change

Your team doesn’t need complex algorithms to know they need to improve. Simple red/green charts coupled with leadership commitment can communicate what is important and necessary to change. 

In the traditional world of management, you may be familiar with red, yellow and green metric charts. Red is bad, green is good. Knowing that, managers lobby heavily for easily achievable goals so they don't have to explain why they have "failed."

However, this is the wrong mindset! Red does not mean you have "failed," rather, it means there is an opportunity. Leaders should be excited to know where the problems are so they can go after the problems, and not the people. "Green" boards are really worthless. If you are green, they don't know where to focus improvement efforts.

Knowing this, use your KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) to communicate the need for change. If your KPI’s are all ‘green’ and you are meeting all your goals, then its time to increase the challenge on your team. Change your goals and create a stretch. They should still be attainable, but your team should feel uncomfortable. They should be questioning whether they can reach these goals or not. By doing this, the problems will begin to emerge.

Once you have created these stretch goals, its time to put some pressure on the team. Communicate the need to reach these goals and work with your team to create and carry out plans for solving problems and reaching these goals. Hold the team accountable for the results.  

Promote ‘Innovation’ and the Development of a Learning Organization

Imagine if Ford would have released the Model T and then simply stopped; no innovation, no consideration of competition, no improvements. Would Ford Motor Company exist today? 

Organizations should be focused on turning ideas into new and/or improved processes to create, improve, or expand business capabilities. The goal is to create an organization that learns, improves, and innovates permanently. As we develop this constant dissatisfaction with the status quo, we create an enormous organizational capability to generate new ideas and solutions all the time. 

As you look forward in time, no process can, or even should, stay the same for long. Those people who are closest to the value-creating work will have new ideas. Those ideas should be used to challenge the current way of doing things and reset it to a new level.

And...the most important consideration is your customer. Without customers, you would not be in business. Customer needs are continually changing. You may have exactly what your customer needs today but tomorrow they may need something else. In order to stay on top of your customer’s needs, you need to be innovative. You cannot meet the needs of customers long-term unless you recognize the importance of innovation and act on it. If you fail to innovate, your business will fail to grow.

Keep it Simple. Keep It Visual. And Continue to Improve.