When you think about the words ‘continuous improvement’, do you think about making things better for people? I do! Sometimes it’s easy to forget that that’s the point of any improvement work we do! It can be easy to get caught up in the idea of ‘improving’ metrics and short-term goals, but increasing or decreasing those don’t always correlate with ‘making things better’. For me, real ‘improvement’ means making things better for people. A simple way to check that you’re really ‘making things better’ is to ask yourself, and the people you are working with, “When this change is made WHO will things be better for? How will our customers benefit? What will be easier for the people who do the work for our customers? How will this enrich the community we live in? How will the world better? If the answer is “it won’t benefit people”, then although the change might increase or decrease the metrics, it might not actually be an improvement. And if it doesn’t help people, do we really want to do it?
