Continuous Improvement – The Bondage of Never Enough and Killer Stress

The Chains of Continuous Improvement

In the current, ever-upward striving to shape the culture of corporate America to closely resemble the Third Reich, we seem to have swallowed hook, line, and sinker the bondage of continuous improvement.

How It Used To Be

Gone are the days when a manager or boss might start a business meeting with the words, “Good job! We’re doing great. Just keep doing what you are doing right now!” That never happens anymore. What we do now in our jobs and professions never seems to be good enough. We are not only expected to improve our performance, we are expected to continuously improve it. From a business math perspective, that means improvement must take place over the smallest time increment possible.

If you performed at an 89 one second ago, your performance had better be a 90 in the current second and 91 in the next second. This is no way to live. This corporate mindset is killing us with stress and unreasonable expectations. Let’s look a little deeper and see if we can illuminate what is happening with this rather dramatic shift in employer expectations over a decade or so ago.

Why Continuous Improvement?

Words are important. In fact, words are like containers. They can hold love, hope, encouragement, and many other intangibles that are necessary for living a fulfilling life. But words can also constrain, demoralize, and enslave the hearers. The phrase “continuous improvement” is interesting on one hand because it is not possible.  Continuous improvement is impossible because–hello!–we are not machines! We are incapable of performing the same way we did yesterday or in ever increasing levels of performance. We are people! We have good days and bad days. We hit it good at 9:00 but maybe not so well at 10:30. Then maybe we’re back on track at 11:00.

The overall effect may be great on Tuesday and merely good on Wednesday. However, like machines, if we are subjected to relentless stress we do break down. Live with it corporate America–inconsistent performance is part of what it means to be human. (Of course, everyone knows that management and administration type people cannot continuously improve either–they just have the power to tell us they do.)

The phrase “continuous improvement” is interesting on the other hand because we might wonder why that particular label was chosen, especially since no one can really do it. Why create an entire corporate culture around continuous improvement instead of a culture of meeting or exceeding a high standard and going home to a nice pot roast? I might also take a minute to point out that typically administration types do not have to answer to a standard of continuous improvement, they just have to make sure you do it. See the difference in dynamics?  I suggest that the choice of words is oppressive and is a tool of domination to expect impossible levels of performance at all times and to provide a justification for punishment when expectations are not met. And, for the most part, it looks like we’ve bought into it. A good question at this point would be “If continuous improvement has become acceptable, what discourse did it replace?” I’m glad you asked.

Good Enough Is Good Enough

Taboo words or concepts within a culture are very interesting. When discovered they give us insights into what is really happening behind the Ozian curtain. Malcolm Gladwell had the courage to not only speak words that are taboo in today’s business culture (and I include education, health care, and all other bureaucratic institutions) but to back up his claim with some convincing observations. He wrote in Outliers that good enough is often sufficient to accomplish what we need to get done. In fact, someone who completes a task to the level of “good enough” may have enough humanity left over to bring other dimensions to the task at hand and contribute to an overall success that is greater than a narrow focus on continuous improvement.

Maybe “good enough” leaves a little room for asking about how the four-year-old did at T-ball practice or offering help to someone who is swamped. But alas, “good enough” has become taboo in today’s workplace and is the kind of discourse that is used only by slackers and those workers who are clearly not promotable. Don’t buy into it. Slip away from the stress and get on with your life.

A Natural Stress Reducer

Isn’t it amazing the number of health problems that link back to stress as a primary cause? High blood pressure, cancer, overeating, depression, panic attacks, and anxiety attacks feed off of stress–the kind of stress produced by a culture of continuous improvement.

So my suggestion to you, gentle reader, is to let it go. Don’t buy into the system pressurizing expectation of continuous improvement. Aim at good enough. For most of us, good enough will be quite good and will achieve all of the expected results and even more. Good enough is, well, good enough.

-Richard H. Porr, Ph.D.