ABSTRACT
Dr W. Edwards Deming was an American engineer, who is widely credited as playing a significant role in the development of continuous improvement thinking and approaches, particularly in Japan. The role of the continuous improvement practitioner is ultimately about skills transfer not doing continuous improvement. Many operational managers have some of these skills but not the time, they believe, to put anything into action. There were many occasions in my early consulting career when the peoples went in and created a programme with internal training and coaching as part of the remit only to be called back again as it had slipped off as soon as we had left. The key to preventing this is for everyone to agree that the skills and culture development aspect is the ultimate goal as opposed to just short-term results. If the latter threatens the former, then of course, it can be done, but it is not continuous improvement.
