Sustaining Continuous Improvement Through Double Loop Learning

Public Service Organisations (PSOs) are facing continuing funding challenges and increased pressure to maintain and improve service delivery with fewer resources. One response, with the promise of improving efficiency rather than cutting services, has been to implement Continuous Improvement (CI) but success has been sporadic and unpredictable. The well documented CI methodologies, notably Lean and Six Sigma, have general agreement across practitioners and scholars alike, thus the reasons behind their potted success must lie elsewhere, in the culture or the environment perhaps? This work explores the wider contextual issues of CI implementation with the aim of providing guidelines to give a greater confidence of successful implementation. A structured literature review provided the initial conceptual framework that was further developed through a series of in-depth, semi-structured interviews carried out with industry experts. This is supported by a case study with a UK health sector organisation. The research shows that emphasis should be placed on addressing logic and mindsets at an individual and organisational level in order to re-focus CI efforts and achieve sustainable process improvement culture. Particular attention should be placed on the role of leaders. This research takes a unique approach to CI in the UK PSO context, providing insights into the achievement of sustainable CI and a theoretical framework for evaluating PSO logic. It establishes a theoretical foundation for the evaluation of organisational learning in relation to sustainable CI in UK PSOs. It also makes practical recommendations to support PSO to reveal, evaluate and address organisational principles through interactive workshops and a preliminary pilot study. Research should continue to focus on the critical role of organisational learning and governing variables in relation to addressing PSO logic for sustained CI.