One of the most common complaints voiced by continuous improvement (CI) champions is people’s reluctance to adopt the kind of thinking that the approach requires. Those who resist are often judged to be closed-minded, unintelligent, or too comfortable in their current situation.

What’s often overlooked is the stress involved in shedding beliefs and habits that may have shaped one’s career for decades. Unlearning, psychologists tell us, is typically more difficult than learning new skills. Furthermore, it’s often the most successful among us who struggle the most.

“Research reveals that the higher you score on an IQ test, the more likely you are to fall for stereotypes, because you’re faster at recognizing patterns,” wrote organizational psychologist Adam Grant in his 2021 bestseller “Think Again.” “And recent experiments suggest that the smarter you are, the more you might struggle to update your beliefs.”

The required shift is perhaps most obvious when we look at how company-wide lean journeys affect the role of leaders with financial backgrounds. “Accountants are trained to think like they can understand everything through the numbers or a spreadsheet,” says Nick Katko, president and owner of BMA, a consulting firm that helps companies adopt lean accounting. “That applies to any operation – not just manufacturing operations. There’s a lot of variability, and there are a lot of problems every day. That’s what accountants don’t understand.”

The difficulty is that the success of a lean transformation will be determined largely by non-financial metrics and a type of logic that accountants may have little familiarity with. “Productivity is increasing output with the same resources,” says Katko. “That’s a performance measurement, but it’s not accounting in the sense that people usually see it. When you use the word accounting, everybody starts thinking debits, credits, and financial statements. So, you can’t measure productivity from just looking at the financial statements.”

Even when their training isn’t directly challenged by the transformation, leaders are often called upon to re-think the role of their professional knowledge in the company. This might involve, for example, no longer viewing their knowledge as something that should be carefully guarded.

“In architecture, you don’t really get into your stride until later on in your career,” explains Sherm Moreland, CEO of architectural firm Design Group, which has followed the Deming principles for over 25 years. “When I was in mid-career, one of my senior colleagues, in a very heartwarming moment, told me, ‘You know, when times were tough, I was put in this leadership position over a team of people, whereas I wanted to keep all the work for myself, because I was afraid that if I ran out of work, you could get rid of me.’”

“So,” Moreland continues, “I had to get comfortable with the fact that this was absolutely the wrong thinking. And I had to share what I knew and get things done, which would free me up to then go find more work, which was what the company needed.”

The difficulty of changing roles

A key roadblock to getting managers to unlearn their old habits is that as leaders, they have likely been praised and rewarded for their behavior according to the traditional top-down system of management. “Line leaders got promoted for doing the things I’m now asking them to stop doing,” says Gary Peterson, Senior VP at O.C. Tanner, one of most successful adopters of lean methodology. “And they’ve made a career out of the exact skill set that we don’t want anymore. So, it’s tough. And I hate to say it, but we lost about half of our managers. But I believe the reason we lost them was that there was not a clear message from the top that this is what we’re doing.”

Managers, it should be pointed out, don’t resist the change just to maintain their status – often they have gained satisfaction from applying their traditional role in order to help others. “Managers often have habits of rescuing people because they care about them and don’t want them to fail,” says Kelly Allan, Deming practitioner and principal, Kelly Allan Associates, Ltd. “They think of this as a kind of mentoring. But they’re not leading by asking good questions.”

As Peterson observes, line workers are generally more receptive than managers to the change, but their buy-in can’t be taken for granted. A classic example of this occurred when World War II veterans came home, often weary and shell-shocked, to find that the factories that they worked in had been transformed to continuous improvement environments through the Training Within Industry (TWI) program.

“They [the veterans] came back to an environment where the supervisor or the workers were working in teams,” says Scott Curtis, TWI’s CEO and president. “They were actively engaged in soliciting the workers’ input on how to make improve things, and this was a drastic contrast to what they’ve seen before with command and control, where they just followed what they were told to do. And so, they were uncomfortable with it, and that was part of the reason why it was quickly abandoned.”

Deeply held beliefs

Lean thinking doesn’t just require casting aside what was learned in school or on the job – it also calls for re-thinking beliefs that may have been held since childhood. Often these beliefs come from mental images that govern our thinking without us even knowing it. One of most powerful of these is the pyramid-shaped hierarchical org chart structure which, people falsely assume, provides a valid representation of how people work together to create value.

Rich Sheridan, CEO of Ann Arbor‒based custom software developer Menlo Innovations, was surprised to see how early this idea is entrenched when he welcomed his granddaughter to his office. Because of the company’s philosophy that minimizes hierarchy, his work area had none of the trappings of his CEO status. Sheridan was surprised at how a young child perceived this.

“We had just moved our office, so everybody wanted to see it,” says Sheridan. “So, my eight-year-old granddaughter, for whom the age of reason is just kicking in, asked me, ‘Where do you sit, Pop-Pop?’”

Sheridan took her over to a table in the middle of the open office area. “This is where I sit, and here’s my computer,” he said.

His granddaughter looked puzzled, and then asked, “Where’s your name? Don’t you have your name somewhere?”

Sheridan was amazed. “I thought ‘wow,’ she already has it in her head that as CEO, I should have corner office with a placard that showed how important I am. And you know, I felt a little embarrassed. She was somehow implying that I can’t be much of a CEO if I don’t have a placard with my name on it. And she’s only eight!”

Now imagine that 8-year-old transported thirty years forward in time, perhaps MBA trained and in a management position. How would she react if a CEO told her that her job was no longer to tell people how to do their jobs, but to become a coach who helps people develop their knowledge and skills so that they and their co-workers can solve problems independently? For her, this might be like being asked to deny a fact of nature.

“Questioning ourselves makes the world more unpredictable,” wrote Grant in “Think Again.” “It requires us to admit that the facts might have changed, that was once right may now be wrong. Reconsidering something we believe deeply can threaten our identities, making us feel as if we’re losing a part of ourselves.”

Unlearning is tough, but in a changing world, it is something that we should always be prepared for.

“The brain has to have routines and patterns that if falls back on,” says Allan. “If you were thinking through everything as if for the first time, you couldn’t be effective or efficient. So, we have to always be ready to challenge our thinking and our learning in order to overcome our automatic responses. That’s one of the key points behind Deming’s theory of knowledge, and why the scientific approach is so critical.”

Parts of this article are excerpted from Productivity Reimagined by Jacob Stoller, which will be released by Wiley on October 8, 2024.