History of Work Excellence
Work Excellence was developed from our love of harmony. Our eighteen-year collaboration began long before we founded an organization that promotes teamwork and the power of same-page thinking. Work Excellence’s beginnings go back to when Steve Gran was a consultant for Brian Cain’s company.
We collaborated for several months working to improve things at Brian’s company. We both put in a lot of work to create improvement plans but kept coming up short.
What we realized by working in and with many organizations and in our work together is the importance of being on the same page. We also realized that the visual representations of those conversations were repeated in every organization we walked into. This has become the framework for what the organization is today. Work Excellence is not about a theory, it’s about applied practice of real teams solving real problems every day.
We were trained in traditional methods; you name it we were trained in it. We found that there was always a missing piece to traditional methods. These methods struggled with getting true collaboration across the organization, they always seemed to fall short. We wanted to change that.
We quickly realized that the issues we were facing couldn’t be solved with traditional methods. That’s because they focus on the tools being deployed rather than on the thinking. When we developed Work Excellence, we deployed tools as well. However, we realized it was vital to focus on the process first before determining if and when to introduce those tools.
Traditional methods force individuals to select tools based on personal preference. The disparate use of tools leaves out the importance of communicating the thinking and providing a common way of working. Tools themselves cannot provide a common method that can be used throughout the organization. You need the method first, and then the tools. That is the essence of human work.
That’s when we started exploring the idea of a drastically different approach, something unprecedented. Our desire to develop a better way of working led to the Work Excellence Method. With this framework in place, we began to see the results we had been searching for. Teams began to understand each other, they began to harmonize. Cultures improved, goals were met and exceeded. From there we have continued to grow and expand into what we are today, an organization dedicated to solving organizational challenges and improving performance.