Herding Cats: Guiding Continuous Improvement in the Tangled Environment

Herding Cats: Guiding Continuous Improvement in the Tangled Environment

You are an internal continuous improvement (CI) employee. You live in a small organization buried in a much larger organization, typically under Operations. Most of the time you are labelled as “service”, and you deal mainly with people in the lower ranks of the organizational chart. The assignments you get are in the tangled environment, and they can get messy very fast. Why? Because work happens in multifunction processes, with people performing non repetitive tasks mostly in information systems, which means high probability of multiple failure modes happening simultaneously, aggravated by office politics and silo view biasing decision making, with conflicts, pressure, frustration and stress being the norm. Typical behaviors in this environment include finger pointing, deferring responsibility, turf wars, sweeping under the carpet or scapegoating. The technical content could be overwhelming. People could be less inclined to cooperate. Contradicting orders might come from the superior ranks. The expectations might be high, but the support might be spread thin. You have a full library of CI books, including classics and best sellers which cover tools and methodologies, principles and theories, leadership and transformation. They give you a good understanding of what needs to be done. Unfortunately this is more a source of frustration rather than helping with your daily work “Why can’t we do this here?”, “This is not rocket science, why don’t they get it?”, “I wish they would listen to me!”, “When are they going to understand what it takes?”, “I told them a thousand times, but it’s not sticking” . The reality is you have no authority – you’re neither a highly ranked individual nor a technical expert; you must rely on the people you work with, to help the business achieve significant and sustained business benefits through successful CI assignments. I wrote Herding Cats for you, with the hope you will find it useful in your daily work. I spent more than two and a half decades as an internal CI employee and I’ve been through similar situations you’re going through, these are my lessons learned. This book is not intended to be a list of principles and theories, there’s plenty of books on that, it is more about how to be prepared for real life situations in the CI field that no theory or abstraction prepares you for. It is not covering an exhaustive list of improvement methodologies and tools either, there’s plenty of books on that, too. Rather, it addresses key points that can derail an improvement assignment and helps you, the internal CI employee, avoid “herding cats” situations while guiding teams to achieve sustained business benefits.