Sarah talks to Scott Converse, who is the Program Director for Continuous Improvement at UW Madison School of Business. Scott's approach to improving the workplace involves reducing frustration levels by utilizing continuous improvement tools and data analysis. This analysis is comprised of both qualitative interviews which collect stories from workers, as well as quantitative research from existing repositories. By doing this, Scott aims to reduce workplace frustration and make work better overall.

Scott discusses the importance of managing change resistance when implementing continuous improvement in process-driven environments. He suggests that it is important to understand what root causes are creating performance gaps and then build a plan for user acceptance and buy in. He also highlights four big process inefficiencies.

If you're looking for insights on how to create a sense of urgency and lead change in your organization, then tune in to hear Scott's advice and experience on how to make an impactful change. Find out how his organization was able reduce their research project setup time, how they were able to improve wait times, and why financial metrics may not always be appropriate for measuring success.

Episode Highlights

14:52 - The secret ingredient to continuous improvement success is that scenario that you just painted a picture of. Whenever you're taking a look at how do we better understand the current state and then make a future state in which work is made better, in which frustration is reduced, some sort of change is going to have to happen.

23:09 - One of the characteristics of poorly performing processes is that you have different groups that perform similar activities, but they all do it different ways.

41:49 - I think that good leaders are change agents in the organization. And so, understanding what are some of the underlying issues associated with change resistance, and what are approaches that you need to employ as a leader to create user acceptance and buy in are really important.

Contact

Sarah Holtan, PhD

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Scott Converse

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Business Process Improvement Using Lean Six Sigma

“Our Iceberg is Melting” by Dr. John Kotter