The EASY and HARD Answers to Why People Are Resistant to Process Improvement

We’ve seen a ton of reference to driving process improvements posted lately.  Mostly all good info, but somewhat idealistic.  The reality is that everyone can come up with something to change in an operation.  Opportunities are kind of like opinions, everyone has one.  But not all the planned value is ever realized.   

We’ve seen suboptimal initiatives drive value and brilliant ideas fall short.  After decades of leading process improvement efforts – and evaluating success or failure, one of the biggest reasons is that the impacted team is simply resistant to it.     

The EASY ANSWERS to this are:  

  • Limited Team Engagement: the team impacted has not been included in the development of the solution. Therefore, the solution often overlooks key details of the activity.  These are easy to gloss over in early stages, but destroy the credibility of the change when it comes to implementation.  “See, told you it wouldn’t work….” 
  • Educational Failures: Fundamentally, process improvement implementation requires that the team be taught a new way. Most process improvements efforts only focus on teaching the new way. This has to be expanded to include the “why”.  When they don’t understand what they are trying to accomplish and why, it’s more likely to fail.   

The HARD ANSWER to this is:  

The Team Doesn’t Feel The Pain:the team being impacted does not see the need to change. The leader and employees are comfortable in the current state.  

This comes from a fundamental breakdown in the metrics and accountability of the operation. To overcome, the first step of any process improvement requires that goals and metrics are aligned with team accountability for a period prior to kick off of the process improvement effort.    

We can’t approach process improvement as this altruistic activity that everyone believes in.  That is not the case.  Demand for change needs to cultivate the improvement at the grass roots level.  We have to illustrate the negative impact to the leaders and employees at an individual level so they understand and ‘feel’ why getting better helps them.   

Check back for future posts.  We will discuss the easy ways to create demand for process improvement, as well as tactics to include the “Voice of the Operations”.