Stop Optimising. Start Fixing.
How continuous improvement is a chimera.
We’ve been sold a huge lie about continuous improvement. The business world is obsessed with methodologies, frameworks, and gradual optimisation cycles. Kaizen. Six Sigma. Agile retrospectives. All promising that slow, methodical tweaks will eventually solve our problems.
But what if the problem isn’t that we’re improving too slowly? What if the problem is that we’re not actually fixing anything at all?
The Continuous Improvement Trap
Continuous improvement sounds reasonable. It feels responsible. It makes us feel like we’re being thoughtful and strategic. We hold meetings about improvement opportunities. We create action items. We measure progress with metrics and charts.
Meanwhile, the thing that’s broken stays broken.
Think about your own workplace. How many ‘improvement initiatives’ are currently underway? How many problems have been identified, analysed, and placed into some formal improvement process? And how many of those problems could have been solved in the time it took to create the improvement plan?
The Power of Just Fixing It
There’s something liberating about abandoning the improvement theatre and just fixing problems when you see them. No process. No committee. No quarterly review cycle. Just:
‘This is broken. I’m going to fix it right now.’
This isn’t about being reckless or impulsive. It’s about recognising that many problems don’t need elaborate solutions—they need simple, direct action. The customer complaint process that takes three days when it could take three minutes. The reporting system that requires seventeen manual steps when five would do. The meeting that could be an email (yes, that one).
When Fix-It-Now Actually Works
The fix-it-now approach works best when:
The problem is clear and contained. If you can explain the problem in one sentence and the solution won’t create three new problems, just fix it.
The cost of the fix is lower than the cost of the process. If fixing the problem takes two hours but the ‘proper process’ takes two weeks of meetings, skip the meetings.
You have the authority and capability. Don’t break things you can’t fix or step on toes you can’t afford to step on. But within your sphere of influence, act decisively.
The downside is manageable. Some problems are worth fixing to requirements right now rather than over-engineering them six months from now. Don’t confuse quality (meeting requirements) with gold-plating (exceeding requirements unnecessarily).
The Resistance You’ll Face
People will tell you this approach is dangerous. That you need stakeholder buy-in. That you should follow the established process. That you need to consider all the implications.
Sometimes they’re right. But often, they’re just protecting a system that values process and busywork over results. They’d rather have a perfectly documented failure than an undocumented success.
Phil Crosby Had It Right All Along
Back in the 1980s, quality guru Phil Crosby made a radical statement:
‘Quality is free.’
Not because it doesn’t cost anything to achieve, but because the cost of poor quality—the rework, the waste, the customer defections—always exceeds the cost of doing it right the first time.
Crosby’s insight cuts straight through our modern improvement theatre. He wasn’t interested in elegant frameworks or sophisticated metrics. His message was brutally simple: identify what’s wrong, fix it completely (to meet requirements), and do it right from that point forward. Zero defects! Not ‘acceptable quality levels’ or ‘continuous reduction in defect rates’—zero.
This wasn’t about perfectionism. It was about recognising that most quality problems aren’t complex engineering challenges requiring months of analysis. They’re obvious failures that everyone knows about but nobody fixes because we’re too busy optimising our optimisation processes.
The Cost of Broken Things
Crosby understood something that our continuous improvement culture has forgotten: every day you don’t fix a known problem, that problem costs you money. Real money. Calculable money.
Think about the broken approval process in your organisation. The one that takes two weeks when it only need take two hours. Every time someone waits for that approval, you’re paying for their idle time. Every delayed project compounds the cost. Every frustrated customer represents lost revenue.
Now think about how much you’ve spent analysing that process. The consultant fees. The workshop hours. The project management overhead. The steering committee meetings.
Crosby would have asked a simple question:
‘How much would it cost to just fix the damn thing?’
The Four Absolutes vs. Endless Improvement
Crosby’s quality framework consisted of his famous ‘Four Absolutes’:
- quality is conformance to requirements
- the system is prevention (not appraisal)
- the performance standard is zero defects
- The measurement of quality is the price of nonconformance (PONC), NOT indices
NB. See also: Quickie: Phil Crosby’s Four Absolutes of Quality
Notice what’s missing? Continuous improvement committees. Process optimisation cycles. Stakeholder alignment sessions.
His insight was that most organisations spend their energy on detection—measuring problems, tracking problems, reporting on problems. Some spend money on correction—fixing problems after they’ve caused damage. Almost none focus on prevention—building systems that don’t create problems in the first place.
But here’s where Crosby’s thinking was revolutionary: he realised that the fastest way to prevent future problems is to fix current problems completely and immediately. Not partially. Not ‘phase one of a three-phase improvement initiative.’ Completely. (And as much as current knowledge allows.)
The Fifth Absolute: Purpose Over Process
Years after Crosby’s original work, his associates recognised something crucial was missing. You could follow all four absolutes religiously and still fail. Why? Because you might be doing quality work without a clear purpose.
The Fifth Absolute addresses this gap:
‘The purpose of quality is customer success, not customer satisfaction.’
But let’s be honest about who we’re really talking about when we say ‘customers.’ We’re talking about the Folks That Matter™—the people whose success directly impacts whether your organisation thrives or dies. Sometimes that’s paying customers. Sometimes it’s your team members trying to get work done. Sometimes it’s the regulatory body that can shut you down. Sometimes it’s the board that controls your budget.
The Folks That Matter™ aren’t just anyone who uses your output. They’re the people whose success or failure has real consequences for your organisation. And here’s the crucial insight: when the Folks That Matter™ are struggling because something’s broken, every day you spend in improvement committees instead of fixing it is a day you’re actively damaging the relationships that keep your organisation alive.
This distinction is vital for the fix-it-now philosophy. Customer satisfaction is often temporary—a polite response to adequate service. Success for the Folks That Matter™ means your work actually helps them achieve their goals in ways that matter. It’s the difference between a customer saying ‘thanks’ and them saying ‘this changed everything for us.’
When you’re deciding whether to fix something immediately or put it through an improvement process, ask yourself: will this fix contribute to genuine success for the Folks That Matter™, or are we just trying to avoid complaints? If it’s the former, fix it now. Don’t let process bureaucracy delay real value creation for the people whose success determines yours.
The ‘Do It Right the First Time’ Philosophy
‘Do it right the first time’ sounds like perfectionism, but it’s actually the opposite. It’s pragmatism. It’s recognition that the cost of fixing something properly right now is almost always less than the cost of living with it broken plus eventually fixing it later plus dealing with all the problems the broken thing created in the meantime.
This applies beyond manufacturing. That clunky onboarding process that confuses new hires? Fix it now, completely, once. That reporting system that everyone complains about? Don’t incrementally improve it over eighteen months—replace it with something that actually works.
The Vaccination Approach to Problems
Crosby thought about quality problems like a doctor thinks about disease. You don’t manage disease with continuous small interventions. You prevent it with vaccination, and when it occurs, you treat it aggressively until it’s gone.
Most organisations treat problems like chronic conditions to be managed rather than acute conditions to be cured. They create dashboards to track the problem. They assign someone to ‘own’ the problem. They schedule quarterly reviews of the problem’s status.
Meanwhile, the problem keeps causing damage.
Every. Single. Day.
Implementation Without Ceremony
Crosby believed in measurement, but not measurement for its own sake. His famous ‘cost of quality’ calculations weren’t about creating pretty charts—they were about making the business case for immediate action.
When you can show that a broken process costs £50,000 per month and fixing it costs £10,000 once, the conversation changes. No more debates about resource allocation or competing priorities. No more requests for additional analysis. Just: ‘Fix it now, because we’re literally burning money every day we don’t.’
The Real Quality Movement
The tragedy of the quality movement is that it got co-opted by people who love process more than results. Crosby’s simple, direct approach—identify the problem, calculate the cost, fix it completely—got buried under layers of methodology and certification programmes.
But the core insight remains: quality isn’t about continuous improvement. It’s about fixing what’s broken and then not breaking it again. It’s about prevention, not optimisation. It’s about doing things right the first time instead of doing them wrong continuously but with slightly better metrics each quarter.
Building the Fix-It Imperative
Organisations that embrace the Crosby approach don’t just solve problems faster—they attract people who like solving problems. They create cultures where seeing a problem and not fixing it feels uncomfortable. Where the default response to ‘this is broken’ is ‘let’s fix it now’ rather than ‘let’s form a working group.’
Building a Fix-It Culture
This means hiring people who see problems as puzzles to solve, not reports to file. It means creating environments where people who fix things without permission are celebrated rather than disciplined. It means celebrating the person who eliminated a stupid process as much as the person who optimised a complex one.
The Real Continuous Improvement
Here’s the paradox: when you fix problems immediately, you actually improve continuously. Each quick fix teaches you something about your systems. Each direct action builds your capability to handle bigger problems. Each bypassed bureaucratic process shows you which processes actually add value.
Real continuous improvement isn’t about following a methodology. It’s about building an organisation full of people who see a problem and think, ‘I can fix this right now.’
Phil Crosby knew that quality is free, but only if you’re willing to pay the upfront cost of doing things right. Everything else is just expensive theatre.
So the next time you spot something that’s obviously broken, ask yourself: Does this need a process, or does it just need to be fixed?
Then fix it.
Your future self—and everyone who won’t have to deal with that broken thing anymore—will thank you.
Further Reading
Crosby, P. B. (1979). Quality is free: The art of making quality certain. McGraw-Hill.
Crosby, P. B. (1984). Quality without tears: The art of hassle-free management. McGraw-Hill.
Crosby, P. B. (1995). Quality is still free: Making quality certain in uncertain times. McGraw-Hill.
Evans, J. R., & Lindsay, W. M. (2017). Managing for quality and performance excellence (9th ed.). Cengage Learning.
For readers interested in exploring quality management beyond Crosby’s work:
Deming, W. E. (1986). Out of the crisis. MIT Press.
Juran, J. M., & Godfrey, A. B. (Eds.). (1999). Juran’s quality handbook (5th ed.). McGraw-Hill.
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