In my previous IT career I put a lot of energy into Continuous Improvement processes (CI) to make teams and processes more efficient, productive, and less wasteful. A topic I'm very passionate about, and I’ve been thinking about how we can take these principles abnd apply them in our personal lives. A lot of people make a lot of resolutions this time of year and a lot of people post frustrations of reading everyone's years in review and resolutions on social media. Whatever camp you're in it's always good to reflect, change what isn't working, and do more of what is.
"Failing Fast and Learning Quick" is a key concept to continuous improvement. Learning to recognise when something isn’t working and changing it quickly to minimise any impact. Using a continuous improvement methodology will gives a framework to identify problems, understand the root cause, work out the options, implement a solution and measure its success. CI processes are used to great effect by professional sports teams in Formula 1, British Cycling and Olympic Rowing and it’s what enables them to “Fail Fast and Learn Quick” within an effective process that enables them to make decisions effectively using data and analysis.
One of the biggest CI methodologies is Kaizen; core to the process is involvement from the people responsible for using, following and engaging with a process – people generally know best what works and doesn’t work, and how to do their job better. A diverse mix of people is key to a CI process. The start of a Kaizen CI process is always to identify the underlying problem. People often get fixated on solutions; without understand the underlying problem first, you won't be able to measure the success of a change in process or tooling, or validate why you are doing it. The next step is to encourage solutions and to collectively choose an idea to explore, based on the best information and data you have. A solution must then be tested; it’s really important to understand what a successful test is and how its measured – how will we judge if the change is a success? Once tested and proven to resolve or improve the problem identified the change will be adopted. A common mistake is also to not audit a change and evaluate its success. Underlying to the whole process has to be data to support the decisions and measure success.
In my previous role as Head of Development we used to hold “Retrospectives” in each every two weeks to review the period and asses what went well, what didn’t go well, and what we’d change. Some team used the questions what made use mad, sad, and glad. All the team would contribute and we’d agree actions for the next two weeks to make improvements. We use a tool called http://reetro.io that’s a free online app that allows everyone to contribute in their own time and visually see all the teams contributions.
Do you think you could apply this methodology to your personal life? Would you perform a Retrospective with you family or friends after a big event, night out or holiday? If a night out was a bit of a flop, or a holiday wasn’t what you’d hoped, have you considered why? Have you ever asked your friends and family for honest feedback? Would you consider involving your family and friends in a discussion about how you could all be more effective as a family or a friendship group?
A key rule of coaching is you can’t coach yourself. If all the pressure wasn’t on you to have the best Christmas, the best Holiday, the best night out, would you feel a little more at ease if you engaged with you friends and family this way? If you were struggling with your mental health would you involve your family and friends to discuss ways of improving your life?
But don't just do it at new year. Do it every month, every week, every morning and make each day as good as you can. Everything else is out of your control already.
Chris.
