The Essence, the Timeline, and Why Improvement Keeps Drifting

I’ve spent most of my working life around improvement. Factories, offices, supply chains, leadership teams. Different sectors, different decades, and the same conversations. And if I’m honest, something has been bothering me for years.

We are very good at improving things. We are much less good at holding them.

People are busy. Programmes are everywhere. Boards are full. The language is fluent. Yet the system always seems to need rescuing again six months later. More effort, more attention, more meetings. It shouldn’t be this hard if we are doing the right things.

Most improvement starts in the same place. A detailed look at where we are now. Current state maps. Dashboards. Measures. Targets built from gaps. It sounds sensible, and often it is. But there is a problem hiding in plain sight.

If the system you are standing in is already distorted, using it as the reference point bakes that distortion into everything that follows. You end up improving your way around compromises you never meant to accept. The work gets better at coping, not better at being right.

That is the bit that bothers me.

Before we talk about tools, programmes, or targets, there is a more basic question that rarely gets asked properly. What should be true if this system is actually working as it ought to work? Not in theory. Not in a brochure. In the real world, with real constraints.

That question is what I mean by the Essence.

The Essence is not a fantasy end state, and it is not perfection. It is the best defensible design of the system at this point in time, given the constraints we choose to live with. Some of those constraints are positive, planned, and moral. Safety. Ethics. Regulation. Fair pay. You do not optimise those away. They define the line you are prepared to stand behind.

Because of that, the Essence is never a perfectly straight line between intent and cash. If you want a straight line badly enough, you can have one. You just need to strip out the safeguards, take the brakes off, lighten the whole thing, and hope nobody gets hurt. You might get away with it for a while. Eventually the market, the workforce, or the law will remind you why those constraints existed.

So the Essence is the shortest, least wiggly route from intent to cash that is consistent with the constraints you are prepared to hold and defend.

This is where the Timeline comes in.

The Timeline is the system as it is actually lived. Not the drawing. Not the intent. The real thing. All the decisions, exceptions, workarounds, buffers, and compromises that accumulate over time. Some are unavoidable. Many are absorbed without much notice. Until one day the system feels heavy, slow, and oddly fragile.

That is drift.

Drift is not caused by bad people or lazy teams. It comes from small decisions made under pressure that never quite get unwound. Over time, those decisions pool as delay, inventory, cash tied up, margin erosion, and risk. You do not see it on day one. You feel it years later.

This is where I part company with much of improvement thinking.

Unless improvement shows up eventually in cash, margin, or revenue, it is not real. It may feel good. It may look good. It may even improve local measures. But it has not changed the health of the system. It is theatre.

That does not mean safety does not matter. It means safety is a constraint, not a scoreboard. If safety improvement is real, it will express economically over time. If it does not, then something upstream is still broken.

Leadership sits here, whether we like it or not. Upstream of tools. Upstream of programmes. Holding the Essence under pressure, and noticing when the Timeline starts to bend away from it. Not reacting faster, but deciding better.

I did not write this to have a go at Lean, Toyota, or Deming. I learned a lot from all of them. I wrote it because I think we have drifted into starting in the wrong place.

Improvement should not be pushed from a distorted current state. It should be pulled toward a clear governing intent.

Everything else follows from that, or it does not hold at all.

This way of thinking is explored more fully in my recent book, The Essence: Time and the Cost of Drift, which sits upstream of tools, programmes, and methodologies.

It builds on the ideas in The Timeline and reflects what I have learned over four decades working inside real systems, under real pressure, where intent matters more than activity.