Over the course of the last couple months, I have had several new acronyms join my ever growing list of anecdotes leading me to conclude that continuous improvement, properly implemented, may be the most important tool for success in business (really any type of business) and, in my opinion, in life in general. Whether you call it a feedback loop, or prefer military jargon such as an “AAR” (after action review), or “OODA Loop” (observe, orient, decide, and act), or software methodologies such as Agile or Scrum (ok, Scrum is arguably a derivative of Agile, but still at their heart is continuous improvement), or manufacturing approaches such as Lean, Kaizen, Six Sigma, or “QRM” (quick response manufacturing), it all traces back to one place – continuous improvement. The newest one I picked up is “the 4 A’s” – assess, analyze, articulate and adapt – which comes from author Amy Herman who has a new book out called Visual Intelligence. Admittedly, I haven’t read it yet, but I heard her on a podcast, and the idea is pretty much the same – learn to be observant, reflect, and improve.
Whatever you call it, it’s the basic W. Edwards Deming idea that if you look at a system (and a business, the execution of that business, each function within a business, etc. are all “systems”) there is information / feedback (in Deming’s case, statistics). Deming was a pioneer in business process re-engineering, and he taught an entire country (Japan, not the U.S. initially…) that if you look at the feedback, you can use it to improve. And over time, these process improvements have evolved out of the world of manufacturing into distribution, services, and office procedures (procurement, finance, etc.). And they also apply to our lives – what are you doing professionally or personally that you want to improve? Assess the system, analyze it, articulate the improvements and adapt. But it’s the focused doing that is of course the real challenge for us human beings – if it weren’t, we’d all be thin and in great shape. So I encourage you to start small – pick a process somewhere in your personal or professional life, document it, think on it, improve it, and track the results. Sometimes it is just that simple, we just lose sight of the forest for the trees…