The Story of Simple C.I.

Simple Continuous Improvement, or Simple C.I., is a technique which I developed and now teach as a simple, repeatable process for solving problems within an organization.

Here is my story on how the concept was developed:

While working as a Continuous Improvement and Process Specialist for a leading Telecommunications company, I made several observations of teams that were trying to resolve issues:

• Teams were not aligned on a problem statement.
• Problem statements that did exist were poorly written and focused on:
  • Blame
  • Symptoms
  • Solutions
  • Too wide a scope
• Without a strong problem statement to align to, the resulting remediation:
  • Failed to receive buy-in from key stakeholders.
  • Was one-sided and dictated from a single source.
  • Focused on short-term cleanup rather than discovery of underlying causes.
  • Achieved short lived resolutions, if any.
  • Failed to deliver “Win-Win” scenarios for the stakeholders.

In short, I observed that while many leaders had a clear understanding of Deming’s “Plan/Do/Check/Act” cycle for issue resolution, without a strong understanding and alignment of stakeholders to a common problem statement and desired state, the PDCA cycle had a relatively low success rate.

So, I set to work helping my team to find solutions to problems that impacted its ability to feel valued and to deliver value in work interactions. I began by encouraging my team to call me directly when they encountered a problem. Through practice, I was able to take the stories people told about their issues and consistently break them down into the following:

• The Problem Statement
  • One or two sentences
  • Without blame
  • Clear
• The Desired State
  • A mental picture of their world if we made the problem go away.
• The Pain
  • Why we should make the problem go away.
• The Stakeholders
  • Who cares about this issue?

In trying to divide their stories, I made some key discoveries:

• The narrative of the stories is almost always messy.
• It takes practice to be able to separate the story into the first three categories.
• After repeating the steps several times, people were able to copy and repeat the format.

In short, I discovered that my methodology could be taught and that most of my team could learn to run all but the most complicated continuous improvement initiatives on their own.

When I left my career in Telecommunications to found Pyxis Great Lakes, I knew I had something unique that I could teach to teams.

Simple C.I. is now the cornerstone of the two-day Agile for Operations course and can also be provided as a one-day workshop to teams who want to “Practice/Practice/Practice” the techniques.

I believe that we subconsciously apply Lean and Agile Methodologies every day of our lives and I can only imagine where we could go if we learned to apply these principles intentionally. I believe in improvement for everyone. I want to be the “Everyday Agilist”!