Continuous improvement, the past, feelings and rituals

Photo by visualpanic

Nametag Scott wrote an interesting post a few days ago under the concept: “You don’t need an idea – you need an I did”. In it he discusses the idea of continuous improvement or Kaizen (which I wrote about in the past). One part of the post really made me think:

2. What will you do differently next time? Kaizen is the Japanese term for continuous improvement. That’s exactly what this question is all about: Honoring your current performance, yet challenging yourself to envision an enhanced future.

In my first five years as a professional speaker, I employed this philosophy as a post-speech ritual. Once my presentation was over, I’d take fifteen minutes to write a stream of consciousness list. Every thought, every feeling and every evaluation of my performance, I wrote down.

What worked? What didn’t work? What killed? What bombed?

This simple ritual grew into a profitable practice for continuous improvement of my performance as a speaker. How could you apply the same reflection process to your job performance?

I find this particular advice powerful because of three reasons:

1. It acknowledges the past, but puts it behind. Scott says: “I’d take fifteen minutes to write a stream of consciousness list”. That is it. 15 minutes. We fret a lot about the past on analyze every aspect of it. We let out attention be captured by it. While it is important not to ignore past mistakes and make sure we learn from them, the focus should be on the future. Feedfoward instead of feedback.

2. It acknowledges the importance of feelings, not thoughts. Scott says: “Every thought, every feeling and every evaluation of my performance, I wrote down”. Yes, we can and should look at things rationally, but we should also look at them emotionally. When are too focused on the numbers, on the performance on the outcomes, we tend to lose touch with our own humanity. I am not suggesting to sit and cry for fifteen minutes after every failed performance, but I am suggesting that we need to recognize the importance of feeling in our performance and decision-making.

3. It emphasizes the importance of rituals. Continuous improvement is all about rituals and habits. Aristotle said: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit”. Yet, most of us trust ourselves to do the right thing, to make the difficult analysis, to put things on the table, to learn from our mistakes. If all of these things were so easy, they wouldn’t be so valuable. There is strength in rituals not only in our personal lives but also in our professional lives. What kind of rituals or habits does your company or team has? What challenges do these rituals or habits help your overcome?

Elad

The service economy, kaizen, bear shaving and standards

Photo by Six Million Dollar Dan

I was studying for an exam in operations management today. I don’t know if this is commonplace for courses on this subject, but it sure feels like we concentrated a lot on manufacturing ideas. As most western states are becoming more service dependent, and as my own experience lies in more service like organizations, I am constantly trying to think about how to apply concepts from the manufacturing world to service world.

One of the most interesting concepts is we discussed is kaizen, the Japanese philosophy that focuses on continuous improvement throughout all aspects of life. In the business sense, kaizen means continuous improvement of all functions of a business, from manufacturing to management and from the CEO to the assembly line workers. This concept is off course very transferable to service as it is to life. I actually think that without knowing the concept I wrote about something similar in my e-book. But, the fact that it is easy transferable, does not mean it is practiced. Hence, bear shaving.

One important part of kaizen is the concept of standardization. Because kaizen is about improvement, a lot of effort is dedicated into standardizing the improvement to keep it in place.  Because an improvement by itself will not contribute to kaizen unless in the end it can be maintained when the people directly involved leave. Moreover what can be continually improved if there are no strong standards for how things are carried out? Without standardised work kaizen becomes something practiced by the individual employee and not by the company as a whole.

And that got me thinking. I remember when I was a course leader in the Israeli Air-force. After every course we de-briefed the course and came up with all kinds of recommendations for improvement. The problem was we had trouble making sure that the instructors who will come after us will learn from our mistakes and implement our recommendations. Because some of the lessons we learned were about day to day activities, course planning or just small thoughts about how to make the course more effective. We wrote in a manual, but, if the people who come after us don’t read the manual, guess what happens. Because I later served as a reserve duty soldier in the same place, I saw in my own eyes, how lessons disappear and every generation of instructors have to learn things from the beginning or come up with ideas, that we already came up with five, six or seven years before.

In a service environment, the reliance on people is even greater than in a manufacturing environment. But creating standards for service is harder. However, harder does not mean impossible. It just means that you have to be more creative about the ways you change the process. In service environment it might even be a good idea to remind people about things they already know on a regular basis. And today, in contrast to my situation in the Israel Air-force more than ten years ago, you have technology to help you. After all, we do leave in a period of “combinatorial innovation“.

So, let’s try an invent ways to standardize service kaizen.

Elad