Knowledgeable Positive Action = Performance
The focus on compliance has been the modus operandi of the world of quality for some time. It is seen as the causal element for businesses to be able to obtain satisfaction with customers. It makes sense – Meet requirements i.e. comply and safeguard customer satisfaction. However, the bigger businesses and certainly the more quickly successful ones are focussing instead on impact.
There has been an awakening in the business world to securing ‘success’ through awe and disruptive paradigm shifts. It is more than merely introducing a novelty in to a marketplace – (although there are things to be said about those too). Rather, it is about bringing into play successive revolutions. Step change (the Hare approach in Kaizen) has traditionally been about reaching a natural end point in innovative gradual improvements (the Tortoise approach in Kaizen) to what is already a tried and tested success model, until it demands an overhaul of the process. Now, instead, time saving, storage reduction, (waste reduction) and leveraging resources in maverick ways has opened a box of delights for the business world.
The underlying element that drives this is not compliance anymore – rather it is performance.
In this is a critical lesson that I have had to learn recently. Performance is not planning, reading up, understanding and moving cautiously, but it’s about being decisive, precise, and knowledgeable in positive action and being timely. In the past, I have relied so heavily on my analytical skills, which have given me some grace in my professional life, but at the expense of losing focus in the mundane and routine, simple things often left by the wayside. Taking the lead with a stern and authoritative persona would not be something I would naturally do and that would be interpreted as an ineptitude for greater seniority and higher levels of responsibility. The faculties of leadership and authority need to come through and that is met through knowledgeable positive action. A certain level of seriousness and discipline is required to ‘perform’ and this is the change that I am engendering in myself and in all those who seek to take council in my mentorship.
