Continual improvement process

And our source for this exploration is this really fascinating, widely discussed article by enterprise architect Victor Luong.

Yeah, it was published on October 31st, 2026, and it's titled The Quiet Discipline of Effective Management, Continuous Improvement.

Right.

And the core premise he sets up right from the jump is that management is just fundamentally misunderstood.

We want to get intentional and aligned acts so that the educational experience indicator is very similar across all of our schools.

All right, Dr. Jay Marino, Executive Director of Systems Alignment and Continuous Improvement.

That's quite the title.

Walk me through these three scenarios.

You know, we think of in our family in terms of mind, body, spirit, let's develop in mind, body, and spirit.

And so the great thing that athleticism and competition teach us is that constant continuous improvement, that we're constantly preparing ourselves for high levels of performance.

And it's really quite important if you want a sustainable business, that you have some guiding principles.

And in our company we have three guiding principles.

If we do a great job taking care of our customers, if we add value, then our customers will take care of our business.

And if our business is safe and secure for the long term, then we'll be able to take care of our people.

And for us, that's that cycle of continuous improvement, taking care of each other so that we can take care of our customers and our customers can take care of our business.

We can reinvest in our people for the long term.

But what made the difference was setting a very clear goal, giving suppliers time to adapt, and then staying consistently engaged.

We have a great supplier pool and they meet every year, at least multiple times a year, but they meet in person at our office once a year to talk through challenges and opportunities to learn from each other, to think about continuous improvement and to partner together with our procurement team and our quality systems team to make sure that we're delivering on these types of commitments.

It's a lot of little things that add up to a big effort.

What I take forward from the learnings from that work is that the outcomes matter most.

Now about what's next.

Now that you've hit many of your animal welfare milestones, can you share anything about the forward facing plans that McDonald's has to keep animal welfare momentum going? Are you reviewing your existing standards to establish a new set of long term goals? What does that look like you're able to share?

One of the things I'm super proud of is the way we look at continuous improvement.

It's at the core of the work that I do.

Matt has a background in petroleum systems engineering and over 12 years of experience working in the energy sector.

He is currently a process supervisor in continuous improvement with FCL at the Co-op Refinery Complex here in Regina.

FCL is Federated Cooperative Limited.

In this role, Matt helps develop cross-plant initiatives and policies, transplants siloed ideas from one group to another, coaches leadership, performs incident investigations, and develops smart action plans to improve the refinery and human performance.

Yeah.

So I...

I wasn't, so I was supervising and then I kind of like right now I'm in a continuous improvement role, which is kind of this, it's a bit of, it's more just filling in the gaps.

So it's kind of some leadership mentoring.

Track it, adjust it, track it again.

That's continuous improvement.

You're being consistent, which will come down to the plate going out of that kitchen being consistent.

All right.

And if they still aren't convinced, well, clearly we just haven't found the right solution yet.

Today, we're going to look at another response that can sneak up on us, especially those of us who work in continuous improvement, operational excellence, lean, or change leadership.

This time, we're not necessarily trying to fix the problem.

We're trying to explain it.