Achieving continuous improvement

Grant Leboff: Brian, one of the characteristics that came out of the book was, in high performance organizations, they’re continually striving, to improve, to keep getting better. I think in the book, you mentioned Toyota in this guise. How does an already high performing organization keep that motivation to continually do better, because I suppose it's easy for complacency to set in, right?

Brian MacNeice: Yeah. Yeah, very much so, and I think again, one of the tests that we had ... We wanted to make sure that the organizations that we chose were ones that had endured over a long period of time, through decades of leadership. In other words, they didn't kind of suffer from this feast or famine, or a spike in performance and then fall back down. The organizations that do that tend to get complacent. Not in a deliberate way, but just they forget that what got us here in the first place was a continual striving for getting ever better at what it is that we do, and challenging the status quo and challenging ourselves to always ask the question, "What more do we need to do to maintain our performance advantage?"

Obviously Toyota are very famous for this. I mean, it's a fundamental ethos within Toyota, the notion of continuous improvement, ‘kaizen’ [Japanese for "improve"] , and everybody's heard all the stories about Toyota, so I won't necessarily talk about it in the context of Toyota.

I like to use the analogy of a road race. Let's say a marathon. There are two ways that you can complete a marathon. You can finish at the finish line and literally collapse over the line and fall down. The effort it's taken to get here has just ... You know, "I have no more, I'm spent." Or, you can finish the race almost running through the tape and capable of running a little bit further.

For me, the high performing organizations, and the ones that endure, are the ones that focus on making sure that our organizational fitness is going to allow us to continually get better and better, and run another marathon if we have to run another marathon, so building that organizational fitness and building the organizational capability on an ongoing basis, through a commitment towards taking on ambitious challenges and asking ourselves, "What do we need to do day in, day out, in order to get better?" and making that a fundamental core of how the organization operates in order to achieve that.

Grant Leboff: Ultimately, is it cultural, then?

Brian MacNeice: Yeah.

Grant Leboff: It's a cultural belief and the striving which then people buy into?

Brian MacNeice: Yeah. I think the cultural component is a really important underpinning of it, but it's also then reinforced by how the organization is managed and how the organization sets out its ambitions for what it wants to do next. How it manages performance in a day in, day out basis. How it creates the feedback loops to allow us to reflect on our performance and figure out where we need to do more and get better. How it challenges itself not to get complacent and makes those conversations a constant narrative.

So yes, it's cultural. Yes, it's leadership. It's commitment to high standards all the time. It's a combination of all of those different things. Refocusing priorities all the time in order to make sure that we know where we're going. Reinforcing some of the management processes to enable us to make sure that that happens as a matter of course. It's all of those things combined, which we built into the Powerhouse model, so it's clear plan, clear set of priorities, process and cultural aspects to how you deliver enduring, long-term high performance.

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