Carol is the manager at Fast Freight. She has implemented several productivity change projects to date. However, these have failed to achieve long-term system wide productivity improvements.

Now, Carol and Steve have sat down over coffee to discuss why these projects might not have been as successful as expected.

Carol: "I think the projects were too disruptive, they took up a lot of our time and resources."

Steve: "I think they only focused on one or two problems that were happening in one area, not looking at the bigger problem, or how it interacted with another problem."

Carol: "Yeah, when we made a change in one area it would get a bit better but then another problem would get worse."