You invest 4 months of your life. You work in close co-operation with the operational teams. You gain buy-in and agreement on an innovative solution to enhance business performance. You build sustainability into the solution. You identify clear benefits in terms of financial, process, people and customer. It’s a text-book project.

So return in 6 months time and what do you find? Rip-roaring success? No it’s been forgotten, the benefits were never banked and the pilot performance improvement was just a blip. Everything is back to “normal”.

It was a simple solution. Implement a feedback-loop to support continual learning.

When information is passed from team A to team B, team B return feedback to team A on the accuracy of the information supplied. Team A review this feedback and continually improve their process. Everyone wins……..or do they. Team A had more work to do in learning from the feedback and decided not to learn.

What can I learn from this? Thoughts go off in all directions on why there was the resistance to change. Maybe it was the feeling that they were being “done to”? Maybe it was because they weren’t being incentivised on achieving the improvement? Maybe it was because there is so much change in progress that this got lost in the fog? Maybe more people should have been hired to allow the change to happen? Maybe, maybe, maybe.

Tips please on how to make solutions stick.