Is continuous improvement blinding you to deeper issues?

Continuous improvement won’t save you from strategic irrelevance.

THINK ON IT: Is continuous improvement blinding you to deeper issues? 

Think about this today: the very thing you’re really good at—improving your business—could be keeping you from doing the very thing that will make it even better.

To be sure, you won’t build your business without a focus on continuous improvement. It is the default mode of business management.

In fact, we spend most of our time optimizing our businesses. We build goals, shape initiatives, build dashboard, and review performance—all through the lens of doing what we did last year, only better. More efficient. More optimized. More streamlined.

The pattern of thinking in terms of continuous improvement is so ingrained within us that it seems unnatural to think in any other way.

But what if this relentless focus on improvement is actually holding us back?

It’s not easy to stop the optimization train and ask, for example, if we’re just selling what we have. Or if we’re selling what customer’s actually want.

This isn’t a comfortable question. In fact, it can feel almost absurd. What do our customers even want, anyway? Sometimes we don’t have a clue. We assume they want better, faster, or cheaper—but do we really know?

Think about it. Do you believe the leadership teams at Sears, Blockbuster, or Kodak weren’t focused on improving their businesses? Of course they were. They were filled with smart, driven professionals doing what they were taught: continuously improve. But improvement didn’t save them—because they were optimizing, not transforming their businesses. Their core markets shifted. Customer needs evolved. And their assumptions went unchallenged for too long.

Continuous improvement is not a strategy for reinvention. And in a shifting marketplace, that can be deadly.

When sales come under pressure, when revenue dips below expectations, the instinct is usually to optimize harder. Launch a new marketing campaign. Replace the agency. Roll out sales training. Swap in a new CRO.

Rarely—almost never—is the first question: Is our core offering right? Are we in the right market? Are we solving the right problem for the right customer?

That’s uncomfortable terrain. But it’s where insight lives.

So here’s a radical thought: instead of asking how to improve the business you already have, ask this—if we had to start from scratch, would we build the same business?

That one question can unlock deeper clarity than a thousand process maps.

Continuous improvement is essential. But as you go about optimizing your business don’t let it become a blinder. Sometimes, the boldest move isn’t to improve what is—it’s to reimagine what could be.

So, how do we safeguard ourselves from missing the deeper issues that may be affecting our business? I offer suggestions on how to do that in the paid portion of this article below. (Become a Premium Member. Paid subscribers get access to nearly 100 tools and how-tos on implementing strategic topics, including a 7-part series to help leaders build their own strategic capacity.)

"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all." — Peter Drucker

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