Many organizations list continuous improvement (CI) as a priority, but it often fails to take root in day-to-day work. It appears as a workshop or a one-off initiative, then fades without lasting change. If the goal is long-term performance and sustainable growth, CI can’t be incidental or optional. It has to be part of everyday work. Yet many teams struggle to know where they truly stand.
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But what if we could measure CI?
To explore that question, 62 teams from different organizations used the CI Pulse model, a maturity assessment tool I developed during my time at Tesla. Although the model was created during my time there, the results shared here are anonymized and aggregated across industries, offering a broad view of how CI maturity appears in real-world operations.
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Comments
Jabberwocky
If the problem is that continuous improvement is not being measured, the solution is to operationally define it in a way that can be measured, monitor its measurement over time using process behavior charts, and iteratively refine the operational definition of improvement as progress is made and more is learnt.
Instead of operationally defining what "improvement" means, this article recommends surveying employees about how well the company is practising "continuous improvement," whatever it's supposed to mean, and then dressing those survey results up into fancy data graphics.
I.e., ask the team what they think, but filter their answers through enough layers of abstraction that you don't have to listen. Define success in terms of subjective metrics that can mean whatever management needs them to. Now you have an excellent tool for beating up employees over the nonachievement reflected in the data, and if they disagree, you've got a trump card: "you don't actually disagree, because you guys already told us what you think, and that's all this data is." Voila; I'll bet the scores go up over time.
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