Lessons From a CI Leader on Scaling Continuous Improvement

Chris Dando has spent over 20 years running continuous improvement programmes across multiple industries and many complex operational environments. Rob Regan has done the same, having kick started his career in electronics manufacturing before moving into Financial Services in improvement and executive roles. Between them, they have seen what scaling CI looks like when it works, and when it doesn’t. 

Drawing on their collective experience, they see the same problems. The same things break, in the same order, for the same reasons. Working together, they identified the 5 ways that cause CI to fail at scale, explored further in this article.

You can also watch the full podcast episode with Chris and Rob discussing scaling CI.

1. Senior leaders who don't model CI behaviours create a culture problem

The most common thing Rob sees at the start of a struggling CI programme is what he calls strategic incongruence. Senior leaders who talk with real passion and conviction about the need for continuous improvement, and stop there. 

"I've had examples where you've had CEOs or senior execs that talk with real passion and conviction about the need for continuous improvement, and that's where that involvement ends. It's the classic words and deeds, and for me that's probably one of the key culture killers."

What genuine buy-in looks like is less complicated than people make it. If you’re running a contact centre, go and put a headset on and talk to the people taking the calls. If you’re in a factory, go to the shop floor, go to the data, go to the people who understand the work.

Stuart Machin at Marks and Spencer has made this a non-negotiable for his entire leadership team. Everyone stacks shelves. Everyone spends time at the front line. 

His point holds at every level: there is nothing more strategic in a business than understanding how it actually works. The moment leaders stop going to the work, the programme starts to drift. 

Is middle management where CI programmes stall?

Below the exec layer, something else is happening. Rob describes it as the permafrost: the middle management layer where strategies reach their limit. 

When senior leaders aren't modelling the behaviours, middle managers get caught between frontline frustration and the expectation that everything's fine.

The result is an ecosystem of mistrust. One where the people doing the work do not believe the programme is being run for their benefit, the people in the middle do not feel supported, and the people at the top are not close enough to the work to know what is actually happening.

"If you don't get buy-in from your senior leaders and your middle leaders, you're doomed, because they're taking a lot of flak from the guys at the front line and trying to manage up that everything's great."

Whilst on paper, the fix for this could be viewed as a training problem, Rob and Chris think it comes down to changing leadership behaviours. Senior leaders don't need to become CI practitioners, but they do need to demonstrate through what they actually do that improvement is part of how the business works.

Drawing on this problem, we built OpX to address this directly by giving executive sponsors a single, real-time view of how the programme is performing across every team and site - savings realised, activity tracked, engagement visible - so the evidence and impact of what is working travels upward without relying on leaders to go looking for it.

Explore more of what OpX can solve for your business. 

2. Vague messaging about why CI is happening destroys frontline trust

When a CI programme is introduced, the messaging tends to follow a familiar pattern:

Capacity for growth

Creating headroom for the future

Optimising for the next stage

Talking of his experience of this, Rob says, "Often when you run a continuous improvement programme there's a core driver, and too often it'll be described as creating capacity for growth, or it'll try and dress up what you're doing as a positive, optimistic outlook. But almost inevitably, in most environments, there is a need to take costs out of a business. And I think by not getting that messaging right up front, it leads to mistrust straight away."

Rob is not arguing that cost reduction is a bad reason to run a CI programme. He’s arguing that pretending it’s something else is worse than being direct. The front line reads the gap between what leadership says and what leadership does. Once that gap opens, trust closes. And once trust closes, engagement follows it.

This doesn’t mean every difficult commercial reality needs to be announced in a town hall. But it does mean the programme needs to be honest about what it is for, and consistent in the way it communicates. 

The Simon Sinek question, as Rob puts it: why are we doing this? If the answer the programme gives does not match the answer the front line already has, the programme has a problem before it has started.

Solving frontline problems builds more credibility

Rob describes a recent deployment where frontline colleagues had built up lists of issues over time. Issues they had raised, flagged, reported, but had gone nowhere. 

A conversation with a senior exec followed, and the ask was straightforward: here are 150 things, please fix 10 of them. The 10 that matter to the people doing the work.

The response was that the organisation was going to build a new app and a new website instead.

"The minute they can see you're doing stuff that makes their life better, they're 100% behind you. The minute they see you saying the right things and doing the wrong things, game over, trust gone."

Frontline engagement is a credibility challenge. From more than two decades of experience, Chris and Rob both agree that credibility is built by solving the problems that matter to the people experiencing them, not by announcing initiatives that are designed to look like that.

OpX Frontline captures ideas from the people doing the work in under 30 seconds, with every idea acknowledged within seven days. It is the mechanism that closes the gap between what frontline colleagues raise and what leadership can actually see and act on.

Ready to close the gap? Explore OpX.

3. Why CI programmes that work at one site often collapse at the next

A CI programme that is working at one site is held together by a combination of things that are almost impossible to name while they are happening. Think:

• The founder energy of the people who set it up

• The relationships between the CI team and operational leaders

• The informal knowledge of where to go and who to ask

• The spreadsheet that only three people know how to use

There’s no guarantee of recreating any of these elsewhere.

When a programme tries to move to a second site, or a third, those informal props disappear and there is usually nothing built to replace them. Rob uses an analogy that captures this well. 

You bend a piece of card, you hold it in shape for a while, and then you let it go. Without the coaching, the follow-up, and the support to hold the new behaviours in place, it springs back to where it was. 

The old ways are comfortable, and the new ways are not yet embedded, so the programme that looked solid at site one is suddenly struggling to establish itself at site two.

Chris saw this directly at a large general insurer,, where 72 in-flight improvement initiatives produced a combined number that totalled to minus five. Brilliant people, working hard, without the clarity or structure to apply their efforts to fewer things better.

How to maintain CI quality and consistency as you scale

Rob frames the coordination challenge using a sporting analogy: if you have 300 clubs across Wales, how do you maintain coaching standards across all of them without creating a system so rigid it stops anyone from doing anything?

The parallel in a CI programme is exact. Multi-site, multi-geography, hybrid working, dozens of teams all running improvement work in slightly different ways. The question is how quality, consistency, and value are tracked across all of it, without creating a bureaucratic overhead that absorbs the time that should be spent on improvement.

"How do you make sure quality, control, consistency doesn't become a bureaucratic nonsense, which we've seen time and time again?"

OpX is configured to the organisation rather than built from scratch, which means the same operating model, methodology workspaces, and governance structure travels across every site from day one. The connective tissue is built in, not retrofitted after the programme has already grown beyond what informal coordination can hold.

Learn more about OpX.

4. Scaling CI creates a reporting burden that crowds out actual improvement

As a CI programme grows, the people responsible for running it find themselves spending an increasing proportion of their time on coordination rather than improvement. Status updates, reporting cycles, and justification conversations accumulate, which means the time available for actual improvement work shrinks in proportion.

The coordination burden lands hardest on the senior and middle leaders who are supposed to be driving the programme at a local level. They were told CI was their job now, but nobody took anything else off their plate.

"We've told them, well, this is your job now, but we haven't taken anything away. We expect them to do all the non-value-add stuff they've always been doing, and we're asking them to do all this other stuff on top. So I think it's working out how do you create that community, how do you create that connective tissue so leaders don't feel abandoned."

The result is leaders who feel isolated and unsupported, and frontline colleagues who feel unheard. The programme that was built to create momentum starts to generate friction instead. And the CI leader, who should be running improvement, is spending the majority of their time justifying the programme's existence to people who are not close enough to the work to see what it’s producing.

Improvement activity without impact tracking becomes invisible

When improvement activity is running across a large organisation without a shared system for tracking it, value disappears into the organisation. Individual projects produce results, micro-benefits accumulate across teams, but the aggregate picture stays invisible and the impact story cannot be told.

Rob puts it bluntly: organisations can end up with teams of people who appear to be busy with Continuous Improvement activities but are seen as being disconnected from their day-to-day responsibilities. Those who were sceptical from the outset feel their concerns have been validated, while those who championed the programme struggle to justify its value because the results and measurable benefits simply are not there.

"You get scattergun improvement and no way of showing impact."

OpX gives CI leaders one place to see every project, every idea, every blocker, and every risk across every team, with weekly cadences, monthly roll-ups, and quarterly business reviews built in. Executive sponsors at OpX customers report 40% time back on programme reporting by the end of year one.

Ready to gain 40% time back? Discover OpX today.

5. The damage of leadership changes and CI programmes without evidence

Every CI programme will face a leadership transition at some point. A new CFO arrives or a CEO changes. A board member asks a question at a review that nobody has been asked before: what has this actually produced?

The programmes that can’t answer that question clearly are vulnerable because the evidence was never built in a way that could be surfaced when it mattered. Which is different from the work not being done.

The value exists somewhere in the organisation, distributed across projects and teams and spreadsheets and the memories of people who have since moved on. It can’t be assembled quickly or presented confidently. In the absence of a clear answer, the programme that has been producing real results starts to look like a cost centre.

Rob saw this dynamic at first hand across multiple organisations. The pressure arrives fast, and the window to respond is short.

"When the doubters come in, because CEOs and execs change so often, something that shows constant return on investment is pretty key."

CI without a strategic link makes demonstrating impact almost impossible

Rob identifies three things that consistently produce this situation. 

The first is not being honest about why CI is there, which undermines the programme from the start. 

The second is going tactical over strategic, starting improvement work at a local level without a clear connection to what the organisation is trying to achieve. The result is exactly what Chris observed at LV: 72 initiatives, extraordinary effort, and a number that added up to minus five.

The third is the absence of sustainable infrastructure. Measurement systems, benefits tracking, coaching and development, learning capability. 

"Lack of sustainable infrastructure, whether that be measurements, learning capabilities, benefits tracking, coaching, development. You have to create the ecosystem to sustain."

Every project in OpX closes with a Value Realisation Report - a signed-off, audit-ready record of what the improvement delivered. The impact story is already there regardless of what changes happen.

The frameworks behind lasting CI programmes

The programmes that Rob and Chris have seen sustain over time treat the infrastructure of improvement as a design requirement, not an afterthought. The real success stories are where improvement programmes evolve into improvement systems. The measurement systems, the coaching support, and the benefits tracking are all built before the programme needs them, not retrofitted after it's grown beyond what informal coordination can hold. 

The pressure in the early stages is almost always to show results fast. That pressure is real, and quick wins can create the breathing room a longer-term programme needs. But going too fast, too broad, without infrastructure in place produces activity without evidence, and activity without evidence is what gets cut.

The other pattern is one that sounds simple and turns out to be surprisingly hard to sustain. Rob describes what he has seen repeat: the first improvement wave playback has the whole exec in the room, the second has four people, the third has two. The front line notices this decrease. 

Treating improvement as part of how the business operates, not a programme being run alongside it, is what signals to every level that this is serious and permanent.

That is what the programmes that last look like. Not perfect from the start. But built with the right things in the right order, and led by people who keep showing up.

Apply for early access to OpX

The patterns described here are what OpX was built around. A CI operating system designed for leaders who are serious about scaling improvement and need the infrastructure to do it. If what is described in this piece sounds familiar, apply for early access and see how OpX works in practice.

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