It’s time to return to your improvement area and think about how to tackle the process of improvement. Sometimes people jump into action, making changes and quickly adopting or dismissing them based on short-term results. That may work for some situations. Many situations require more attention, not just to the actions and results but to the process and system. We started that by setting and collection measurements about the baseline performance.
Improvement involves:
- deciding on and planning an improvement process
- determining the current situation (understanding the system and setting a baseline)
- making changes (taking action)
- seeing what the effects are (collecting, analyzing, and interpreting the results), and
- adjusting the process and the actions
When large processes are being modified, there is a whole discipline of process improvement, and the effort may require specific project management effort to manage all of the tasks and resources in a structured way.
For sustained benefits, a layer of organizational change management is usually wrapped around the effort to make sure sufficient consultation, education, and process change are performed for the changes to be embedded in the structures of the organization and the habits of the people.
While each of these areas are fun and important and I’ll be coming back to them, I’ll assume that your improvement area is more modest, and continue with my sleep example as we delve into the first couple of points
Example
Suppose I’ve decided that I’ve somewhat vaguely decided that I want to sleep better because I’m feeling tired during the day. In a previous post I asked you to set some metrics and start measuring, which was a little bit premature but important to start the ball rolling.
I’ve decided to measure my lights out time, the number of hours until I wake up, the deepness of my sleep on a scale of 1 to 5 as recorded soon after I wake up, and how energetic I feel at 3 p.m. each day on a scale of 1 to 5.
That seems fairly straightforward, easy to do, and at the very least, not useless. We can assume that whatever we choose at the beginning will need to be adjusted, sometimes a lot.
I’ve chosen a few metrics, not too many; I’ve framed them in a positive way, how energetic, not how tired; I’ve made them specific, at specific times; I’ve made them quantitative, numeric. Deepness is subjective, but a device or a partner could complement the perception. Energy is subjective, but a colleague or partner could supplement the perception. For the current example, let’s stick with the basic self-reported perceptions.
From a planning standpoint let’s set a goal: I want to have a meaningful improvement at the end of 1 month. Well, that’s pretty vague. How about, I want to feel an improvement of 3 points in my deepness and energy scales averaged over a seven day period?
Knowing nothing, that could be reasonable. But presumably I’ve chosen this area of improvement because I’ve tried a few things, and progress has not come easily, so I’ll want to choose achievable goals. If I can make some changes and see some successes, I will be motivated to keep going. If I set big goals and miss them by a lot, I could just give up the whole effort.
Averaging is important. Many measurements fluctuate a lot, and to understand the trend requires some kind of smoothing of the values. There are other types of smoothing, but let’s keep it simple.
The other aspect is the time scale. For simple systems, one month could be a long time. The human body and mind is not a simple system. It makes sense to give myself a bit more time to make a meaningful improvement. I might have to try a few things and let them soak before I feel confident that there’s a difference and what’s causing it. So my revised goal is: I want to feel an improvement of 1 point in my deepness and energy scales averaged over a seven day period, by the end of 2 months.
What else do we need to put into our plan? We’re going to measure and write the values into a table or spreadsheet. We need to be able to calculate an average of the each of the measures for the first seven days, for the final seven days, and perhaps a few times in between, so it’s starting to feel like a spreadsheet could be handy.
Being able to generate graphs is also useful. For this personal example, there is no need for technology, yet. A pen, paper, ruler, and manual arithmetic are sufficient. This is a great example of where learning a tool will give you great power in any domain of your life. If you don’t have familiarity with spreadsheet software, I would highly recommend learning at least the basics — free software and online tutorials abound.
The last thing we need to do as part of our improvement process for this simple example is to set a review schedule. When will we update our averages and see if we’re making any progress? In my example I could say I’ll take a look at my results weekly at a specific time, Sunday evening, and at that time I’ll:
- update the averages
- review the table and graphs
- consider any obstacles that I’m encountering in making the changes
- consider whether I need to make a major change to the improvement system as a whole — but I don’t want to tamper too early or often otherwise I lose the value of the measurement system every time I change it
Okay, I think that’s enough for this post! We’ve set up our measurement system and started capturing our baseline. Next we’ll look at understanding the situation and making changes.
Exercise
For your improvement area, go through the same process I did for my sleep example:
1. Set a goal — specific, measurable, agreed-upon, realistic, and time-bound
2. Review your metrics and adjust them if required.
3. Determine what you need to set up as a system and schedule.
4. Look into learning spreadsheet software if you aren’t familiar.
About Learning
As we explore learning, improvement, and thinking, it will serve us to remember that we are shaped by our own educations, in my case a Western tradition with the precepts of Greece, Rome, and the Judeo-Christian faiths at its foundation.
It is difficult to even become aware of what we take for granted, what is embedded as invisible, unquestioned, and often unquestionable assumptions about knowledge and conduct.
As a starting point, we can become aware that there are other long-standing and well-developed traditions that have often been overtly or more subtly dismissed, with different approaches and emphases, and as we explore deeper we can actively seek out and explore what those traditions can bring to complement and deepen our understanding.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDCA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMAIC