Defining the CI Environment

What is the Continuous Improvement (CI) Environment? I hadn’t discovered this term in my 20+ years’ experience of CI, until conducting an academic research project a few years ago. Even then, it didn’t jump straight out of existing literature – the term ‘CI Environment’ presented itself as I completed my MSc research project a few years ago.

I’d like to think that I invented this term, but a quick conversation with ChatGPT has put me right, apparently… “there isn't a single person credited with inventing the term "Continuous Improvement Environment", the principles… have evolved over time through contributions from various individuals, organizations, and methodologies”. It would have been bold to make this claim.

I will, however, claim to be the first to develop and publish a graphical model describing the CI Environment, with the help of my academic mentors and co-authors [1]. This was part of research work to understand what affects CI success for organisation's, and the role that leaders play - the role of organisation leaders will be the subject of another article to follow.

In this article we’ll introduce that model of an ‘Organisation’s CI Environment’, making it more accessible to a wider audience, but based on the original work. The model describes distinct parts of a CI Environment, and how these are connected. It identifies both tangible things that should be present in the CI Environment, and intangible elements that ultimately drive a CI culture within the organisation. We’ll build this and I’ll explain it as we go.

The tangible elements of the model are the best place to start. These were identified from thorough review of existing literature, including wisdom and best-practices now captured in Excellence models and International Standards. For the experienced quality or improvement leader, there will be few surprises as you review these tangible elements shown below:

Key references:

Original paper [1]: S. R. Fannon, J. E. Munive-Hernandez and F. Campean, "Mastering continuous improvement (CI): the roles and competences of mid-level management and their impact on the organisation's CI capability," The TQM Journal, vol. 34, no. 1, pp. 102-124, 2022.

In summary, the tangible elements describe the organisation system, direction, strategy, knowledge, goals and KPI’s (top row). Additionally, there elements which enable CI within the organisation. If any of these elements are missing, then CI activity will be more difficult to do.

Leaders in the CI Environment play a crucial role in connecting the tangible elements of the organisation’s CI environment and the intangible elements related to CI culture. The model describes how the values and beliefs of an organisation’s leaders toward CI can influence their behaviours related to CI activities. For the ‘Practitioners’ of CI in the workplace, this combination of tangible elements and leadership behaviours represents the CI Environment. These leadership behaviours, in turn, shape the values, beliefs, and therefore priorities and actions of their teams and other individuals within the organisation too. This is captured by the additions to the model shown below:

Tangible Elements in the Organisation’s CI Environment

The Organisation’s CI Environment – Perspective of ‘Practitioners’

The term ‘valued artefacts’ in this context means the ‘things’ that leaders are seen to value… plans, evidence, analysis, status reports, project records, risk management etc. etc. The things that are valued by leaders become important to practitioners. The CI Environment and leadership behaviours drive CI activity and action, results and benefits. The behaviours, actions, results and benefits and stories from CI activities inform and slowly re-write the underlying culture of the organisation.

The success stories, results, benefits and shared beliefs from CI activities go on to inform and align the values and beliefs of leadership relating to CI, informing leadership behaviours within the CI Environment, therefore closing the loop to form a cycle – “The CI Culture Cycle”. This cycle can build and reinforce the CI culture throughout the organisation, but it also describes how CI confidence, culture, belief, behaviours and results can degrade over time too. The complete model including this cycle, with minor adaptations from the published work [1], is shared below:

The Organisation’s CI Environment – Adapted from the orignal model [1]

The CI environment and CI culture are strongly interdependent and together determine CI capability of the organisation. A positive cycle of reinforcing CI culture should enhance these enablers of CI capability through positive action by leadership. However, this CI Environment and culture can also be disrupted by competing initiatives, cultures, business pressures, leadership change, and other external factors. I’ve experienced these disruptive influences as an Improvement Leader in a large organisation, and as I’ve worked to support the development of other Improvement Leaders. This risk of disruption to the CI Environment is ever present and described in the model with lightning-bolt graphics.

The original work[1] fully describes the references and reasoning that informed the development of this graphical meta-model of the CI Environment and explains how the validity of the model was confirmed. This work also describes the importance of organisation leadership within the CI Environment, given their critical interface to both practitioners of CI and the tangible enablers of CI, and recognises that their unique role and capability to fulfil this should be considered carefully. That’s the subject of my next article, which I hope you’re already interested to read.