You’ll NEVER “Find” Time for Continuous Improvement

There’s a common question among people new to Lean. As they become familiar with what this continuous improvement philosophy has to offer, they realize that it will also come at a steep cost in terms on the investment of time.

They realize that there is a lot of learning and practicing to be done. Because continuous improvement cultures require broad acceptance, everyone in the organization needs training. People in specialize roles will need even more training.

They realize that there is a lot of planning. Managers and senior leaders bear the brunt of this load, and it’s not like they often have a lot of extra time to spare.

They realize that they need to build an infrastructure. They need an area set up to work on projects. They need to get tools and materials for projects on hand, and they need to manage those areas and tools and materials. They need to create a red tag area. They need to develop processes and forms and the above-mentioned training programs.

All that needs to be done before the first improvement project or real change actually takes place. That means extra time being spent before any new time is freed up.

So once leaders realize that it takes so much effort to create a continuous improvement culture, they look for ways to ‘find the time’ to do it.

Let me be clear. You can never ‘find’ time. That’s because it is never lost. You know exactly where it is and exactly when you will get more of it, and you know exactly how much you will have tomorrow, and the next day, and the next.

It isn’t a matter of finding it. It is a matter of prioritizing it. It is a matter of saying that the things mentioned above, as well as improvement projects are worth doing.

You’ve just got to put it on the calendar, and that will mean two things.

1. You’ll have to take other things off the calendar. This can be a challenge, but you’ll just have to decide what is most important. Question any minute that you spend doing something and decide if it is more important than continuous improvement.
2. You’ll need to buy more time in the form of increasing your headcount. If you can’t, or as more often happens, won’t, reduce other time expenditures, you need more time. It’s not lost. It’s just expensive. Generally, I recommend hiring temp workers during the early phases of the business system development process. You’ll have to create easy jobs for them to do, or more accurately, jobs that temps can easily slide into. And you’ll have to actually bring them in.

Eventually, there will be one more time related decision. You’ll have to delay harvesting your gains until you free up the capacity to include continuous improvement as part of your core workload. Generally, I like to see about 10% of your capacity reserved for improvement efforts. That means everyone can spend a few hours each week on a project, or that you can send one person to a kaizen team without crushing production.

The gist of this article is that there is a mental mindset you need to switch. Lean will never be successful if you look at it as an afterthought. You would never say, “How do I find time to send out bills to my customers?” There are some things that you know you just need to do, and those things always get time.

Make continuous improvement one of those things.