Summer is waning, kids are going back to school, and John Dyer and Dr. Mohamed Saleh are taking a break from Behind the Curtain: Adventures in Continuous Improvement, the podcast they launched to share wisdom and opinions gained from a combined more than 60 years of continuous improvement expertise.

In this “best of” episode, we are revisiting their first installment of Behind the Curtain, where the duo addresses essential ingredients and common pitfalls to successful team-based continuous improvement transformations.

What are two essential ingredients for helping an organizational transformation occur and be sustainable for the long term?

1. Trust. Driven by leaders’ intent, psychological safety and a shared mental model.

About trust, Saleh says: “I think [trust is] an undervalued element of any organizational success,” also admitting that it wasn’t a key ingredient for him early in his career. “I was very focused on performance, and I did not understand what it took to get trust.”

“Trust is so easy to lose as well, right? You could spend 90% of your time building trust and then lose it with one bad decision,” adds Dyer.

“Every morning you have to work on it,” Saleh says. Leaders “must have that intent every day that I'm going to be a certain humble leader and trying to be able to demonstrate rituals and practices to foster a behavior that shows people they could trust me.”

2. Organizational design. Recognizing that organizations are adaptive, open systems that should be treated like an organism.

Organizational design is not a framework, Saleh emphasizes. “If I think of it as a framework, I'm thinking through an operational lens, and I'm missing out on things like adaptiveness. I'm missing out on leadership, on culture. I'm missing out on complex problems because I have one cookie way of solving these things.”

What are reasons for organizational transformations to fail or not achieve their potential?

1. Resistance to changing what is foundational to an organization.

Dyer points to companies that rely on principles that brought them success in the 1950s and 1960s but which don’t work today to support team-based continuous improvement. He cites outdated promotion criteria, for example, which rewards the fire-fighter or command-and-control leader, both of which “are counter to empowering teams, empowering employees closest to the process, so that they can address problems real time on their own without a lot of intervention from their leaders.”

2. Organizational arrogance. An organization’s belief that it doesn’t need to change because it is good enough—or that it has changed and reached peak excellence.

Dyer outlines an example in which an organization concludes, “We don't need to do the teams anymore. We don't need to train anymore. We don't need to develop our people anymore because we're good enough.”

He says, “The moment that happens, and I've seen this many, many times. The moment an organization reaches that point in their journey, they're dead. Yes, because at that point they'll start regressing, they'll start falling backwards, and they'll start doing old bad habits.”