Ask people around you whether they’ve made any improvements or have been part of a larger improvement initiative at their workplace over the last couple of years or so and the answer most probably will be Yes! Moreover, many of them will probably tell you that they’ve made not only one but several improvements. Great! But… And here comes this awkward “but”. Do all these improvements (or perhaps changes as we should call them more correctly) lead to desired outcomes? Stick over time? And are traceable?

The purpose of this post isn’t to give you a detailed analysis of the types of improvements we make in our daily work or how they affect the bottom line (or any other key variables we monitor for that matter) but rather to characterize the concept of improvement and provide a little more nuanced view of it, mainly from a practitioner’s standpoint.

1. Improvement is relative to the end result and not to a labeled tool/technique employed to achieve this end result. Although it seems to be natural to look at the outcomes when speaking about improvements we tend to talk more about the tools and techniques we use rather than the end results we achieve. Of course, the choice of the improvement tool is important and deserves its legitimate attention, but the fact that we use this or that particular tool/technique doesn’t necessarily mean that we achieve the desired end results.

2. Real improvements stick over time. Whether we want or not, not all improvements last long. Some of them are random pseudo improvements difficult to explain and the others simply fail to stick over time due to the reasons we often know (or can easily pinpoint). As such, it’s important to take a long-term perspective when speaking about improvements. Is the improvement we made last year still sticking or are we back where we started from?

3. Improvements should be traceable. Maybe not always but most of the time we make a lasting improvement we should be able to trace it back to some specific actions we’ve taken in order to achieve it. Traceability might vary from one place (business/sector of industry) to another but overall there should be some kind of association/relationship between the end result and the actions that led to it. Otherwise we are back to those random – often temporary – improvements that we know won’t last long.

4. The end result we attain as a consequence of improvement at our site must be better than that of our peers/competitors. One way to see whether we’re improving or not is to look at our own improvement curve over time. However, we should also be able to compare it to our peers’/competitors’ curves and show that our end results are better than theirs in a fair comparison.

5. Improvements must be relevant and meaningful. Once we get skilled in “improvement technology” it’s easy to make improvements that in fact matter least. Therefore, it’s wise to think whether the things we’re trying to improve are the ones that are most relevant and meaningful? Or maybe we should shift the focus from easy-to-improve to relevant/meaningful-to-improve approach?

These and perhaps a few more characteristics are important to keep in mind when speaking about improvements. Tools and techniques are out there – and it actually doesn’t take much time to master them, especially some of the basic ones – but by thinking through these characteristics we can better understand our current improvement efforts and make them more effective.