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The Process Improvement Challenge
Every organisation faces the same fundamental challenge: how do you unlock productivity by removing the hidden inefficiencies that hold teams back? As Chris Cooper, one of the world’s leading experts in enterprise upgrades and a founding partner at STRAKT, has demonstrated through his multiple Shingo Prize awards, the answer lies not just in understanding improvement methodologies, the answer lies in experiencing them firsthand.
Traditional process improvement methodologies - Lean, Six Sigma, Kaizen - provide powerful frameworks. Yet organisations consistently struggle to translate theoretical knowledge into practical process and business improvement results. The gap between knowing what to do and actually making improvement work remains stubbornly wide.
During my years as a psychiatric nurse, I witnessed something that profoundly shaped my approach to business and leadership development: the artificial separation between personal well-being and professional performance is not just unhelpful - it's fundamentally flawed. You cannot separate the person from the professional. Mental health and well-being aren't separate from leadership effectiveness - they're fundamental to it.
Yet walk into most corporate training programmes, and you'll find this truth conspicuously absent. Leadership development focuses on strategy and communication. Sales training emphasises techniques and processes. Management programmes cover delegation and performance management. Meanwhile, the human being experiencing stress, anxiety, burnout, or personal challenges is expected to somehow compartmentalise these experiences and perform optimally regardless.
Mistake: to blunder in choice; misinterpret; to make a wrong judgment of character or ability
Do you see your mistakes as a gift or a burden?
Show me someone who says he or she has rarely made a mistake, and I’ll suspect that person is not telling the truth or he or she is living in a pool of mediocrity.
There are varying degrees of mistakes, but the way we respond to our mistakes and learn from them is more critical than making them in the first place.
The training room falls silent as Sarah, the only woman on the senior leadership team, shares her perspective on the company's new strategy. Around the table, her male colleagues nod politely, but their body language suggests they're already moving on to the next agenda item. Meanwhile, Ahmed, whose thoughtful insights have consistently impressed in smaller settings, remains quiet throughout the session, his valuable contributions lost to a facilitation style that favours the loudest voices.
This scenario plays out in training rooms across the UK every day. Despite good intentions and significant investment in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, many organisations struggle to create learning environments where all participants can contribute their best thinking and achieve their full potential.