There I was, scrolling through a Mercer article at circa 2000 metres of altitude on a chairlift leading to a stunning view of the pyrenees mountains. I was trying to check a number that had caught my eye on staff turnover in the workplace. I had to check because when I was reading the article the evening before, I was a couple of gins in and it hadn’t registered for some reason. Now I’m up the mountain on doddery legs about to attempt a red piste with my youngest and she’s giving me the evil eye for not taking in the view. How the tables turn.
Anyway, their survey shows an 8-25% turnover in production year on year depending on the industry and so forth. Let’s be lazy and call it 12% conservatively, it’s still astonishing.
I put my phone away and try to keep up with my daughter on the red. I need to escape as quickly as possible from the three victims of my snowboarder’s dismount from the chairlift. They should never have put me in the middle.
The number sticks with me the rest of the afternoon. The survey flicked me onto another article demonstrating the impact on leadership churn with the arrival of a new CEO. Again, astonishing. And this got me thinking about my previous blogs on the kaizen flag and Standardised Work.
Organisations Are Designed to Forget
Organisations like to believe they improve over time. They invest in tools, train people, reorganise, refine, and recommit. Each initiative carries the promise that tomorrow will be more capable than today. And in many cases, that promise is fulfilled; at least for a while.
But beneath the public reporting and visible activity, another force is always at work, one that erodes capability not through failure, but through absence. People leave.
They leave through promotion, through reassignment, through retirement, through resignation. Sometimes they leave because they have succeeded. Sometimes because they have not. But they leave nonetheless. And when they leave, they take something with them, not just their labour, but their understanding. The accumulated knowledge of how the system actually behaves is walking out the gate.
I remember from my days in aerospace when we let an operator go. He was the only one who new how to set up the jigs to marry the fuselage and wings. He was back within a week as a contractor charging a fortune. His standard consisted of walking round the assembly and jigs measuring off against the height of his nose.
So it is not about how it was designed, nor how it is documented but how it truly works. As Fujimoto says: knowledge must be embedded in standards to persist beyond individuals.
The Hidden Impact of Workforce Turnover on Capability
Churn at this high percentage, it seems, is the natural state of most organisations. And churn is constant. It gets worse with regime change. A new CEO takes the helm and circa 40% of the C suite will be gone with a further 40% of the leadership team leaving after 18 months. From what I understand the churn at the frontline stays roughly the same unless there is a push for savings. But again, I question in my mind how it is possible to maintain quality or service in this environment, especially if standards are not truly embedded.
Here’s a thought: within roughly five years, half of management has turned over. At the frontline, the turnover is even more dramatic. In many operational environments, between sixty and eighty percent of the people who performed the work five years ago are no longer there. The system may look the same, but the memory that once lived inside it has largely been replaced.
This is the organisation’s memory half-life.
When you look at the pyramid above and cast your mind back to the kaizen flag, with blue being the maintenance, adherence and improvement of standards, less than 50% will have been in tenure when they were created. If they were created.
And that distinction determines everything. Because organisational capability resides in preservation. This is where Standardised Work becomes essential; not as documentation, but as memory.
Why Standardised Work Is Organisational Memory
Standardised work is the act of converting experience into structure. It is the mechanism by which learning becomes independent of the individual who discovered it, ensuring that knowledge survives turnover, survives promotion, survives leadership change. It allows capability, deep knowledge to accumulate to our competitive advantage instead of resetting with each generation of workers.
How Span of Control Determines Organisational Stability
But standardised work does not preserve itself. It depends on leadership proximity. It depends on leaders who remain close enough to reality to see when the standard no longer reflects the truth of the system. And this is where span of control becomes key.
When a supervisor is responsible for a small team, they can observe deeply. They can see the subtle deviations that indicate instability. They can intervene early because they have the time They can coach, adjust, and ensure that learning is stabilised into the standard. In this environment, standardised work evolves continuously and is a reflection of reality.
But as spans of control widen, this proximity disappears. Observation becomes intermittent and understanding more abstract. Leaders manage reports instead of behaviour, responding to outcomes rather than causes. The connection between reality and the standard weakens. Eventually, the standard no longer reflects how work is performed and becomes historical rather than operational. At that point, organisational memory has already begun to decay.
Leadership Churn and Organisational Knowledge Loss
Leadership churn accelerates this process. Each leadership transition introduces new priorities, new urgency, new focus. Improvement initiatives begin. Energy is applied. But improvement requires continuity. It requires time to stabilise into standardised work. When leadership attention shifts before stabilisation is complete, the learning remains fragile. It exists in practice, but not yet in structure. And what is not stabilised is not preserved.
Operators and supervisors recognise this pattern intuitively. I’ve seen enough eye-rolling from operators when the manager appears, or the subtle wink indicating scepticism. It’s clear: wait till they’ve gone, then we’ll talk. They learn that leadership attention is temporary, and that standards, unless continuously reinforced, are negotiable. They adapt accordingly, relying on experience rather than documentation. Knowledge returns to the individual level, where it becomes vulnerable once again to turnover (just like our man using his nose as a gauge).
So this is my worry. With a churn in leadership of 5-8% and a churn at the frontline of anywhere between 12 and 20%, how does the organisation continue to function when its capability is compromised. It’s kind of maintaining motion but in the absence of progress.
Why the Improvement Flag Allocates 50% to Standardisation
This is precisely what the improvement flag reveals. The flag allocates half of organisational effort to standardisation. Not because stability is more comfortable than change, but because stability is what allows change to persist. Kaizen improves the present. Innovation creates the future. Standardisation ensures that both survive the natural churn of the organisation itself. Or we hope it does. Again, my worry about the quality of standards persists. Without standardisation, each leadership cycle risks resetting the system, jeopardising improvement and making capability about the person and not the wider system.
If I summarise my last couple of blogs, its: Mono builds the knowledge and knowhow. Hito builds and challenges the people. Hansei builds the insight. Commitment builds the attention, and lastly, standardised work ensures none of it is lost. what chance, therefore, have we got without cracking standards to fall back on?
My takeaway
Organisations do not accumulate knowledge automatically. They lose it automatically with churn. To accumulate knowledge we need deliberate stabilisation and Standardised Work is the mechanism that stabilises learning.
I’m getting nervous before my next run. She’s pointing at a black piste. Have I got the capability and knowhow? Can I reach the required standard? Am I going to become a statistic? Too late…
Some light reading if you are interested.
Fujimoto, T. (1999).
The Evolution of a Manufacturing System at Toyota.
Oxford University Press
Mercer (2023).
Global Talent Trends and Workforce Turnover Survey.
Mercer Consulting.
Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance (2023).
CEO Tenure and Succession Trends in Public Companies.
