Our thinking impacts continuous improvement Our thinking impacts continuous improvement. Let’s focus on “Excellent Thoughts” and work on eliminating “Forbidden Thoughts.” 11 Excellent Thoughts 20 Forbidden Thoughts I am responsible for improving my work. I have an improvement idea. How can this process be more effective? What can be done to prevent this from occurring again? Who are my customers? What do my customers expect? Would my customers be willing to pay for this? How can I improve results? How can I make this task hassle-free? How can I make this even better? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? That’s the way we’ve always done it. We tried that before. It’s too radical a change. It’s not broke . . . why fix it? We are special, it won’t work here. We are an exception. It’s against corporate policy. No one has done this before. Our IT systems won’t allow that. Our people aren’t trained to do that. The customer wouldn’t accept that. That person does not have the time. We don’t have time. We plan on doing it someday. It isn’t in the budget. We’ll have somebody study the problem. Top management would never go for it. Let’s shelve it for the time being. It’s too hard to implement. It costs too much.