Any organization or organism seeking to improve does so by changing some aspect of the current condition. An athlete seeking to improve her 10,000 meter times, trains by running longer distances at slow paces and shorter distances at faster paces.  These training regimes may can result in sore muscles and breathlessness (I know, I’ve been there).  However, the athlete knows the pain associated with training is what leads to improvements in performance. In essence, the improvement comes from the change in training regime.

In many work environments, however, we loose sight of the connection between improvement and change. We focus on change and ignore the reason for change — change is the vehicle for improvement.

Charles Kettering, a famous early 20th century engineer once noted "The world hates change yet it is the only thing that has brought progress” (source: http://www.happypublishing.com/blog/15-change-quotes/).

Perhaps the reason “the world hates change” is because we focus to much on the change and too little on the improvements? Or perhaps we are comfortable with our current state and don’t care to improve? Or perhaps we don’t believe the proposed change (whatever it is) will lead to an improvement.

What do you think?

Zombie Initiatives

Recently, a colleague shared with me a story about an initiative that continued well past its useful life.  Without getting into the details, the initiative, which had good intentions, resulted in formation of a committee to review requests to use an IT application in a specific use model..  The “good intent” was to ensure that, early in the life of this use model, there would be special oversight to ensure success.  That was the good intention.  After three years and several hundred applications, the committee was still meeting on a regular basis.  When asked under what conditions the committee would deem its work completed, no one knew the answer. In fact, no one recalled who chartered the committee or who was authorized to deem the work of the committee done. What was clear was that the committee charter did not include the conditions under which the committee work would be deemed complete – even if it was just the passage of time.

Committees that never finish their work and projects that never end are best described as Zombie initiatives because you cannot “kill them” even if you try. In LEAN terms, it seemed that the wastes of Over-Processing and/or Over-Production were present here.

Often, these Zombie initiatives become such a fabric of daily work that no one even questions, “why are we doing this.” Yet, by not questioning, “why are we doing this”, we are creating the wastes of over-processing and over-production over and over again.  Imagine the resources we could free up to work on customer-value-added or business-value-added activities if we could kill Zombie initiatives, whether the initiative was a project, a committee, or a regularly scheduled meeting.

Perhaps one technique to prevent future Zombie initiatives is a strong charter for the initiative that states the conditions that will terminate the initiative.  And one of the conditions should always be the lapse of time.  The sponsor can always renew the initiative if he or she desires. But, barring that explicit renewal, initiatives should terminate or sunset.