How to Build Potemkin Villages in Quality Improvement
Cooperation Inhibition Programme, Cosmetic Internal billing Principle, Creative Internet Participation, Classical Impediment Production, Continual Ineffective Pressure – these creative malapropisms for ‘Continuous Improvement Process’ (CIP) suggest that in many businesses something is not quite right with the way this process is set up.
Of course, a periodic improvement process can achieve repeated and considerable increases in productivity. Well-designed optimization programmes can mobilize the knowledge of experienced employees in a way that a strong division of labour and hierarchical organizational structure normally preclude. Employees comb the business for problems and weaknesses, bringing to the surface mistakes and wasteful practices that employees knew about all along but to which they were unable to draw attention.
Experience shows, however, that the number and quality of suggestions for change decrease over time. Employees’ initial enthusiasm for searching for weaknesses ebbs. The proposals become increasingly banal and trivial. Energy and drive evaporate. A paradox seems to emerge: continuous improvement processes mostly lead to short-term successes. The claim that CIPs allow for never-ending processes of improvement cannot easily be squared with the fact that the usefulness of CIPs diminishes over time.
The main problem appears to be a perverse effect that CIP programmes can have in businesses that have a lot of red tape, a strong hierarchy, and a marked division of labour. In these cases, the application of CIPs, which are designed to counteract the insufficient exploitation of the experienced employees’ knowledge, can end up intensifying the weaknesses of the organization.
In a business with divided responsibilities, a CIP can lead to more power games between employees from different divisions. The employees from the production sector fail to notify their colleagues in development, planning, and production planning of possible mistakes in good time, because in so doing they can reap the rewards of having come up with a larger numbers of suggestions for improvement. Thus, instead of continuous collaboration on the optimization of specific processes, there is increased competition between the different divisions.
CIPs often bring about significant deviousness. The closer individual success is linked to the number of proposals for improvement produced, the more likely it is that elaborate Potemkin villages will be created. A business that promises its employees a compact car for 1,000 improvement proposals should not be surprised to find that the screw box at the production line moves from left to right and back again at monthly intervals as a result of periodic improvement proposals, without there being any visible improvement. ‘Quality improvement facades’ go up in attempts to prove to senior management that there are tireless efforts at improving processes and products.
