The Improvement Infrastructure

Pam Vecellio • October 8, 2025

Change is accelerating, and with it comes both opportunity and challenge. Improvement is part of every organization, team, and individual conversation—but the question is: do we have the right infrastructure to make change faster, easier, and better? Let's explore what “improvement infrastructure” really means, why it matters, and how it works in practice.


WHAT IS IMPROVEMENT

Improvement is the ongoing pursuit of helping people achieve better outcomes - often beyond historical norms and beyond what is thought possible. Improvement has many names - Continual Improvement, Continual Quality Improvement, Process Improvement, Continuous Improvement, Performance Improvement, Quality Improvement, Lean, Six Sigma. Call it what you'd like, as long as the improvement infrastructure supports and guides higher performance. An improvement infrastructure includes these 6 elements:


WHY IS CONTINUAL IMPROVEMENT IMPORTANT

Good improvement will always create win-wins for all customers, team members, funders, and community (no trade offs). With leadership and focus it engages those that do the work in improving their work and outcomes. Read some testimonials. See image here with some benefits of creating extraordinary results:

HOW CONTINUAL IMPROVEMENT WORKS

Improvement and higher performance becomes exciting, fun, easier, and more impactful when organizations adopt and lead with all six foundational elements. The good news, this is not complex, applicable for any team from 2 - 20,000 members, quite enjoyable and satisfying! 

  1. PEOPLE - Engage hearts and minds; equip them to solve organization challenges and create good change. A learning: this may be the most important element. Without our people - who do the work, know the work, and implement changes - how can you progress?! People development ideas  Core Skills
  2. LEADERS - Providing support with processes, systems, structure, expectations, and create the ‘we can’t fix a problem if we don’t talk about it’ environment. Supporting performance ideas
  3. Providing FOCUS on our value-add to identify data-driven priority gaps and align resources to achieve goals and accelerate performance results. Focus & alignment ideas
  4. Use proven, data-driven METHODS to solve problems faster and better.
  5. When researching improvement, methods may be in the forefront. There are methods for everyone (foundational) and methods for those facilitating improvements, aka CI Champions (advanced). 
  6. Identifying waste will lead to the improvement method(s) that will solve the problem most effectively and efficiently.
  7. A learning: using methods or one element alone will not ensure improvement success.
  8. Continually LEARNING from everyone, everywhere to improve more.
  9. IMPLEMENTING what is prioritized with measures, standardized work, training, coaching, and feedback systems. 


More on these 6 elements - Tarot Cards (have fun exploring the six elements, each card reveals insights for building your infrastructure. or Organization assessment webinar to self-assess current infrastructure. There are many more technical and social aspects to improvement, let us know if interested in going deeper. A good resource - Lean Champion Resource Guide.   

 

By building a strong improvement infrastructure and empowering teams to improve one process at a time, teams can continually achieve extraordinary results. See 1 example here -