Being really good at 'learning how to learn,' as President Bill Brody of Johns Hopkins put it, will be an enormous asset in an era of rapid change and innovation, when new jobs will be phased in and old ones phased out faster than ever.

Thomas Friedman

Mission

Profound Knowledge Partners Asia helps leaders and their organisations in the Asia Pacific region to:

Strategically envision, innovate and optimise their products, services, and processes for market superiority and build their people for sustainable capability through consulting, training and business coaching services.

Vision

Profound Knowledge Partners Asia is renowned as one of the most successful and trusted business advisors for innovation, improvement and change management in Asia Pacific, delivering acknowledged value to an ever-growing client base.

Practical Values

Probity

  • Always give the best advice, even if it is not popular, with the utmost care
  • Operate according to the laws in the countries in which we work and expect the same from our clients and partners
  • Operate at the 3rd level of ethical and moral reasoning

Value

  • Provide tailor-made solutions
  • Deliver measurable results
  • Help leaders and others move from ideas to practical application

Confidentiality

  • All client information is managed securely
  • Intellectual property must be protected by all

Learning

  • Promote continuous trial and learning approach for client organisations to drive innovation
  • Strive to deliver leading edge solutions, by staying at the forefront of industry research and learning
  • Ensure ideas have merit and are theory-based

Ensure values alignment with clients and partners, even to the extent of sacrificing short-term business

 

The foundation of everything we do starts and ends with Dr. Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge

Our Story

Throughout the 1980’s, Dr W. Edwards Deming reached thousands of people with his message to transform their organizations.
He envisioned an organisation that works as a system with the aim for all stakeholders to win.
The transformation Dr Deming described required a new style of management.

Organisations that recognised the importance of Dr Deming’s message took steps to accomplish the transformation. Many organisations found it difficult to connect their improvement efforts to the strategic and day-to-day management of their organisations. What was missing was a template and method to get started.

 

In 1985, the members of Associates in Process Improvement (API) began work on methods to help organisations embody the philosophy taught by Dr Deming into the way they managed their organisations. The API team published “The Improvement Guide: A Practical Approach to Enhancing Organisational Performance” in 1996 (Second edition 2009). They determined it was crucial to have a common road map and method to guide the efforts to learn, improve, and focus on quality, throughout the organisation. The Model for Improvement was developed for this function. It has its foundation in the scientific method, brought to business by Walter A. Shewhart.

 

The Model for Improvement defined three questions that are crucial to answer to build an improvement charter and integrate change concepts into the transformation. They accelerate the building of knowledge by emphasizing a framework for learning, the use of data, and the design of effective experiments (rapid prototyping and testing). Developing a plan for the change and criteria to measure improvement, leads to the use of the PDSA cycle.

 

It is easy for people to list their products or services and to describe the processes that produce them. It is much more difficult to know how to improve processes, products, services or even the whole business model. Making such changes in a wholesale way across large organisations without negative unintended consequences is both an art and science. API established the Quality as a Business Strategy (QBS) framework to guide the development of strategy and execute sustainable and coordinated improvement throughout the organisation. This has been latterly refined and termed it the Strategic Enterprise Improvement System (SEIS).

In 2001, Jane and Cliff Norman established Profound Knowledge Partners Inc. (PKP Inc.) and in 2006 developed AmiTM (Accelerated Model for Improvement). It builds on the Model for Improvement and provides a structured and standardised approach. This structured approach paves the way to repeatable improvements and helps with the spread of these improvements within the organisation, guided by the SEIS framework. It puts the organisation in a “Learning Mode”, and aligns teams, opening the door to creating a Learning Organisation, guided by the SEIS framework.

 

After working with PKP Inc as a customer in 2002-2004 and learning from them in the ensuing years, Profound Knowledge Partners Asia was formed in 2013, to help extend the value of PKP Inc’s Deming-based Strategy and Business Improvement approaches, tools and methodologies across Asia Pacific, including AmiTM and SEIS, the ultimate in agile methods.

 

More recently PKP Inc and Acquate have partnered to create a digital, next generation, version of AmiTM. Aimi (Accelerated Innovation & Model for Improvement) is the only application that fully incorporates the Model for Improvement and PDSA Cycles into a complete business improvement management cloud-based software. Profound Knowledge Partners Asia has partnered to distribute and support the implementation of this outstanding application.

 

Also in 2020, Profound Knowledge Partners Asia has partnered with Entheo to spread The Six ‘i’s® of Innovation framework, tools and methods for Innovation in the market.

 

The need for rapid innovation and change has never been greater than now and Profound Knowledge Partners Asia, can help you build strategy, drive innovation and improvement, engage your teams and manage change for profitable growth.