Insight: When CI Got Tangled in Colour – And How KISS Untied It

Case Study: When CI Got Tangled in Colour – And How KISS Untied It

Sometimes the fix is so simple, it beggars belief how long it stayed broken.

One of my clients—a solid mid-sized industrial business—was struggling with their Continuous Improvement (CI) program. Not because they lacked ideas, or commitment, or capability. But because they were tangled up in card colours.

They had four physical cards on their CI boards:

• Yellow for Quality Non-Conformances
• Blue for Process, Equipment, and Facilities Improvements
• White for general ideas
• Pink for Safety issues

Each card had a watermark. Each colour had a purpose. And each one came with a mental model that made the whole thing feel more complicated than it needed to be.

Turns out, they’d inherited the system from a supplier who copied it from a bigger player, who copied it from Caterpillar Production Systems. Now Caterpillar has 112,900 employees and over 500 global facilities. So sure—those distinctions might mean something to them. But even Cat could use a dose of KISS on this one.

For my client? The delineation was meaningless. Every single solution—whether it came from a yellow, blue, white, or pink card—ended up as a CI. Managed by the same procedure, the same SOP, and the same register.

So we simplified:

• Keep the cards. They’re familiar.
• Don’t stress about choosing yellow, blue, or white. The solution is a CI either way.
• Pink cards (Safety) are the exception—we track those separately to meet ISO 45001 reporting requirements.

The result? Clarity. Confidence. And a CI system that finally works the way it was meant to.

Fixer Insight:
When systems get copied without context, complexity creeps in. The real fix often lies in understanding the human behaviour behind the confusion—and applying a little common sense.