Change & Continuous Improvement: Swimming Toward an Answer

From Angela Knobloch, FST Change Management & Continuous Improvement Workstream Lead

To ensure continuous improvement, it’s important to understand the real problem we’re trying to solve. In Lean terminology, it’s called Root Cause Analysis (asking "Why?" over and over again!).

Consider this example from when my son was a competitive swimmer in high school. The star butterfly athlete graduated and as my son went in to his senior year, the team looked to him to step up and win butterfly races. However, as his senior season got underway, his times in butterfly races were way off. The coach was completely surprised. It didn’t make sense that he wasn’t even hitting his own best times.

If you were his parents or coach, your next step to help improve his performance was critical. So we explored some possible causes together:

• Is he distracted by a new girlfriend?
• Is he working hard at practice?
• Is he mentally stressed from the pressure?

None of those seemed to be an issue. So the coach decided to do some underwater filming of my son’s butterfly stroke. And lo and behold the culprit became obvious: his form and timing going into his turns didn’t look the same. Long story short, my son had grown over 5 inches the summer before his senior year! His technique hadn’t adjusted for the additional body length. A targeted focus on his technique to accommodate his new height did the trick. He was soon winning a lot of butterfly races!

Now consider if the root cause wasn’t really addressed. What if the coach had made him work “harder” at practice? What if as a parent I grounded him from time with his girlfriend? Well—you get the picture. No amount of good intentions will help improve a situation unless the root cause is addressed.

Do you understand the problem you are trying to improve? Start with asking “Why?” five times in a row to ensure you are getting to the root cause!