What it means
Continual improvement is the improvement of the system and of performance over time. "Continual" means regular rather than uninterrupted: every period you look, every period you take a step.
What feeds it
- Monitoring and measurement results (9.1).
- Internal audit findings (9.2).
- Management review decisions (9.3).
- Incident and nonconformity investigations (10.1-10.2).
- Worker participation and suggestions.
How it is evidenced
- Trend: how an indicator moved between periods. A single period's number says nothing.
- A closed loop: an action born of a finding, completed and its effectiveness verified.
- Less recurrence: the same finding not appearing at the next audit.
Misleading evidence
A falling accident count is not by itself evidence of improvement. If the reporting culture weakened, the numbers fall too. That is why lagging indicators are read together with leading ones such as report counts: if reporting rises while accidents fall, the improvement is real.
The small-step principle
In most organisations, small improvements completed every month go further than three large projects a year: each completed step produces a result and leaves evidence that the system works.