Tuesday, January 1, 2013

Start small

Here it is, New Year's Day. I've been meaning to get back to blogging for a while. Today seems like a good day for new beginnings.

What's been holding me back? I've been busy but probably a more significant impediment is the idea of re-committing to blogging. They say that when your goal is (or seems) too large, your amygdala (lizard brain) kicks in with a fear response...it has been called the amygdala hijack. And the fear response might be enough to make up excuses not to pursue the goal. So start small, under the radar of the lizard brain.

So I did.

Happy New Year!

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Keywords: continuous improvement

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Cycles within cycles

How often does a teacher repeat what she does? A course of lesson plans is repeated once a year. The process of preparing to teach a day's lesson occurs daily. The behaviors involved in managing the activities in the classroom occur on a minute by minute basis. What is the relative importance of each of these? If a teacher's teaching is to improve, which timescale is most important to focus on?

All of the timescales are necessary for effective teaching. The shortest timescales probably have the greatest effect because they are repeated most often. They also have the benefit of becoming habits, executed without conscious attention, because they are repeated so often.

Ultimately, the longest timescales are the most meaningful. If a course is taught expertly on a minute by minute and day by day basis, but the course covers practical applications of astrology or phlogiston theory, the entire course is still a total waste of time.

What separates the best teachers from the worst? Typically, it is the short cycles. The long cycles tend to be handled at higher levels. States mandate learning objectives. Textbooks organize bodies of knowledge.

A teacher who has little control in the classroom will be ineffective. A teacher who fails to plan and prepare each day will waste students' time. A teacher who fails to provide timely feedback to students will miss critical opportunities for helping those students build their understanding.

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Keywords: Continuous improvement

Friday, June 8, 2012

Compounding improvements

Continuous improvement of processes is like compound interest. Improve a process today and it is improved into the future. Improve the process further tomorrow and that improvement builds on the improvement you made today. And so it goes. Each improvement builds on all the others in the same way that compound interest works for investments.

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Keywords: continuous improvement

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

What is improvement?

People assume they know that continuous improvement is. But many of them are mistaken.

The most fundamental idea behind continuous improvement is that it is improvement of a process, not a product.

Let's say you're putting together a lesson plan. The lesson plan is a product. Should you improve it? Of course, but how can your improvement of this lesson plan be applied to other lesson plans? If you improve your process of creating great lesson plans, all your lesson plans will improve.

If you make a list of your improvements, what should your list look like?

• An improvement is something you've done. Adding a task to your to-do list is not an improvement.
• An improvement to a process is far more important than an improvement to a product. If you need to obsess over a product to make it perfect, you're doing it wrong unless you're also improving your ability to make the next product perfect without obsessing.
• Don't assume that just because you've obsessed over something you've learned from the experience. We fool ourselves then we think that just because we know something today, we'll remember it tomorrow.

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Keywords: continuous improvement

Monday, June 4, 2012

But sometimes I've got to get stuff done!

You may say to yourself or hear from others, I don't have time for improvement! I have things that must be done!

It's the familiar issue of urgent tasks vs. important tasks. First, I assert that improvement is not just one important task but one of the most important tasks! If you improve a process today you will reap the benefits of that improvement every time you use the process. That's how you create a lasting benefit!

Some tasks are not urgent and not important. Surfing the web or playing a game of Spider are examples. The problem is when people assume that since a task like improvement is not urgent (you can make it through your day without the improvement), it is also not important. Wrong!

One way to handle important tasks (like improvement) that are not necessarily urgent is to schedule a time to do them. And the assumption is that if the time is scheduled, you will block out other urgent tasks that may arise. (If you don't block those urgent tasks, what was the point of scheduling?)

A second way to handle important tasks that are not urgent is to make them urgent. You or your supervisor can create goals with deadlines for completing important improvement projects. The deadlines create urgency.

Another approach is to look at the tasks on your to-do list. Are there tasks there that are urgent but not important? We all have a tendency to give requests from others a level of urgency because it will please the requester. But it can destroy effectiveness. You end up spending your time on unimportant tasks.

So it primarily comes down to a conflict between tasks that are important but not urgent and tasks that are urgent but not important. When considered this way, the choice is clear: do what's important.

And remember, improvement is one of the most important things you do!

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Keywords: continuous improvement

Friday, June 1, 2012

Where to look for opportunities to improve

Reflection

• Students often say they would like to sleep on their books and learn by osmosis. But alas, learning requires attention. The same holds true for improvement. It isn't likely to just happen. You need to give it attention and make it happen.
• Have you just had a frustrating experience? Can't wait to forget about it? Bad idea. Instead, think about it. What made it frustrating? How could it go better next time? How will you be prepared to make it go better next time?

Monitoring: Automatic Reflection

• If you keep track of key measurements, reflection becomes nearly automatic. As the run chart of your measurements show your performance start to fall, the question why? naturally enters your mind.
• If you see your performance improving, it is just as important to ask why? and build upon your success.

Eliminate Waste

• Sort tools and materials keeping essential items close at hand and rarely used items accessible. Get rid of what you no longer need. Got a minute? Look around for how you can make your physical or online space more convenient.
• Shine: make your area clean and keep it that way. Got a minute? Is your PC file system a mess? Make it a little better.
• Set in order: make your area and processes orderly avoiding the waste of time looking for things. Got a minute? Put something in order. 
• Standardize: You can prevent wasting time, materials, effort and mental effort through standardization. Got a minute? Do you have a good set of templates, snippets and macros that you reuse? A little up-front time can save a lot of wasted time later.
• Sustain: after making improvements and eliminating waste, revisit the issues to make sure you keep it going. Got a minute? The crud comes back. Keep after it.

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Keywords: continuous improvement

Friday, May 25, 2012

Paring down motivations

Six opportunities for motivation and improvement.

1. Internal improvement: Knowledge
   • What did I learn today?
   • What didn't I know and need to learn?
2. Internal improvement: Skills, danger management, emotional regulation, perserverance 
   • To what areas should I devote deliberate practice to improve my skills?
   • Would I benefit from coaching or seeing myself in action?
   • Any threats or conflicts avoided, finessed or defused?
   • Was I able to control my emotions in order to attain peak performance or did emotions get in my way?
   • Am I taking on tasks at the edge of my current abilities to provide challenge yet successful outcomes?
3. External improvements
   • What improvements in the form of processes, tools, components, products or ideas have I created?
4. Competition and measurement
   • Am I measuring my performance?
   • How am I doing relative to past performance?
   • How am I doing relative to others?
   • What can I do to improve my performance?
   • Am I getting immediate feedback on my performance?
5. Relationships and cooperation
• Am I working with others for the pleasure of relationships and to mutually benefit from cooperation and collaboration?
• Am I building or depleting social capital?
6. Optimal Choices
   • Am I taking advantage of my opportunities?
   • In particular, what choices did I make in terms of my attitude, emotional responses and assumed motives of others that improved my day?
   • Am I properly balancing short-term urgent needs with important long-term needs (especially improvement)?

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Keywords: Continuous improvement

Friday, May 18, 2012

Revisiting continuous improvement in knowledge work

What constitutes continuous improvement in knowledge work?

1. Continually root out all waste
• What wastes your time?
• What wastes your talents and capabilities?
• What is being redone that could be automated or templated?
• Delve into why you do what you do. Is it all necessary and efficient?
• Who else has solved this problem? Must you resolve it?
• What do you do that creates no value (in the eyes of the customer)?
• What processes are in place only because of inertia? What can be eliminated?
• How can errors be eliminated (take them one at a time, error by error)? How can errors or defects be identified as early as possible?
• What don't we know about what we are doing? How can we better understand it?
2. Strive to make tacit knowledge explicit
• Are you making dumb mistakes? Specify work as simple checklists.
• What can be automated?
• What can be streamlined with standard parts like templates, boilerplate and copy and paste?
• Can you use the Pareto principle to make the easy 80% effortless while freeing time for the more challenging 20%
3. Establish measurable goals
• How can your process and goals become measureable?
• How can your process become more visual?
• How much measurement do you need to reduce uncertainty to make informed decisions?
4. Specify how team members should communicate
   • What can be communicated through shared resources such as databases and knowledge bases?
   • How can you effectively communicate (i.e., share information) with others without interrupting them (answers on demand)?
   • Who needs to know what? Who does not need to know what (so don't bother her)?
   • What facts are needed to resolve common questions?
   • What are your most common errors or situations that arise? Can they be pre-solved once rather than re-solved every time they occur?
   • What is an error and what is a style preference? Who resolves style preferences?
5. Use the scientific method to solve problems quickly
• Have you defined the problem?
• What evidence defines the problem?
• What evidence would indicate that the problem has been solved?
• What evidence shows that your changes are improvements?
• Has your candidate solution solved the problem? If not, try another.
6. Recognize that your processes are always a work in progress
• Do you realize that your job is not to do your job, but to do your job better?
7. Improve knowledge and skills
   • What have you learned?
   • What do you need to learn?
   • How can you learn it?
8. Have leaders blaze the trail
• Does management emphasize continuous improvement frequently and over a long time span?

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Keywords: continuous improvement, knowedge work

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Lessons from games: Motivations and reflection

In my last post, I discussed video game motiviations. How can they be applied to the practice of daily reflection for improvement? Why not simply use the list of needs as a checklist of things to consider in the reflection? Not only is it likely to improve my performance, but is also a roadmap to making my days more personally rewarding.

1. Knowledge
   • What did I learn today?
   • What didn't I know and need to learn?
   • Can I learn it right now?
2. Skills
   • To what areas should I devote deliberate practice to improve my skills?
   • Would I benefit from coaching or seeing myself in action?
3. Competence
   • What do I feel that I am coming to master?
4. Perseverance
   • How was I challenged to persevere on a difficult but worthwhile project today?
   • Was there an example where perseverence paid benefits?
5. Creation
   • What did I create today or help others to create?
   • What recent improvements did I work into my routines today?
6. Danger Management
   • Any threats or conflicts avoided, finessed or defused?
7. Competition
   • How am I doing relative to others?
   • What can I do to improve my ranking?
   • Am I getting immediate feedback on my performance?
8. Cooperation
   • How did I help others today?
   • How did cooperation help each of us do better today?
   • Am I building or depleting social capital?
9. Caring
   • Did I demonstrate caring for others today?
   • Did others care for me? Did I show gratitude?
   • How might others benefit if I showed more caring and gratitude and what opportunities should I watch for?
10. Emotional Regulation
    • Was I able to control my emotions in order to attain peak performance?
    • What other emotional controls do I need to work on?
11. Optimal Choice
    • What choices did I make today that were particularly pleasing?
    • How am I taking advantage of my opportunities?
    • In particular, what choices did I make in terms of my attitude, emotional responses and assumed motives of others that improved my day?
    • What choices did I make that should have been made differently?

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Keywords: continuous improvement, reflection

Monday, May 14, 2012

Creating habits for improvement

It's easy to say that you would like the folks in your organization to have a habit of continuous improvement. It's harder to make it happen.

The end result we are looking for is for everyone in the organization from the bottom to the top to have a habit of looking for opportunities for improvement and making those improvements. So, how do you build such a habit?

A habit consists of a cue, a routine and a reward. The cue triggers the habit, the routine is the process that a person executes and then the reward keeps him doing it.

Let's say you're going to encourage folks to reflect daily on their day to think of opportunities to improve. You create a cue. In this case, it's a time cue: 15 minutes before quitting is reflection time.

Now, create a routine. What is supposed to happen during reflection time? Perhaps it's to list the major activities of the day and consider improvements for each.

What's the reward? If reflection time is mere compliance to an administrative directive, that's not much of a reward. Or maybe the reward is to avoid the wrath of one's supervisor if the work is not done. Again, not much of a reward. Or perhaps the reward is the feeling of well-being one gets from seeing his performance get better and better. Possible. That's a long shot, but the odds can be enhanced through measurement and tracking so improving performance can be easily visualized. But it's still a long shot.

Video game makers want their games to become habitual (addictive, actually), so what rewards to they provide? An interesting article on The Theory of Gaming Motivation puts it this way:

There are 11 basic psychological needs that people can fulfill by playing video games. ... The 11 basic needs are gaining knowledge, gaining and improving skills, feeling competent, persevering through hard times, creating tools, managing danger, regulating emotions, competing for rewards, cooperating for rewards, caring for loved ones, and satisfying the senses with pleasant inputs (sights, smells, sounds, etc.). In the model they will each be referred to by their relevant nouns. Only “satisfying the senses with pleasant inputs” is called “Optimal Choice” because that is the purpose of satisfying our senses. They help us make the best choice by making us feel attracted to “good” things and repelled by “bad” things.

We do not always feel the 11 basic needs for what they are. Most often we simply crave the rewards that they offer and intuitively do the right things to fulfill neglected needs. The three types of reward we feel are achievement, recognition and satisfaction.

And here are the needs and their rewarding feelings in games:

1. Knowledge
   •  Rewarding feeling: Achievement
2. Skills
   • Rewarding feeling: Achievement
3. Competence
   • Rewarding feeling: Achievement
4. Perseverance
   • Rewarding feeling: Achievement
5. Creation
   • Rewarding feeling: Achievement
6. Danger Management
   • Rewarding feeling: Achievement & Fulfillment
7. Competition
   • Rewarding feeling: Achievement & Recognition
8. Cooperation
   • Rewarding feeling: Achievement, Recognition & Fulfillment
9. Caring
   • Rewarding feeling: Recognition & Satisfaction
10. Emotional Regulation
    • Rewarding feeling: Satisfaction
11. Optimal Choice
    • Rewarding feeling: Satisfaction

In a work situation, there's one more need that's not relevant to gaming: meaningfulness. Games are enjoyable but playing them doesn't help our fellow man. But teaching, contributing to useful products or activities that benefit others can feel meaningful. We have to remember, however, not to rely too heavily on the long-term rewards of meaningfulness. It is much more effective to incorporate the 11 more immediate needs and rewards listed above.

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Keywords: continuous improvement, rewards

Friday, May 11, 2012

Improvement logs

If you want to improve something, measure it. Obviously some things are easier to measure than others. One of the easiest things to track for continuous improvement is the improvement log.

The improvement log is a simple list of improvements that you've made. It's not a to-do list. It's not improvements you're going to get around to someday. Although those lists are valuable, they aren't improvement logs.

I set goals for the number of improvements I want to make in a month. When I make an improvement I simply add it to the list. It's encouraging to watch the list of improvements grow and it's motivating to see how close or far I am from my intended goal.

Improvement logs: simple but effective.

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Keywords: continuous improvement, improvement log

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Voice dictation: a near-universal improvement opportunity

I have used Dragon NaturallySpeaking for several years. I've used it to dictate two books, and a lot of the documentation for our products. It is really easy to compose text this way. (I am currently dictating through Dragon as I write this.)

It feels a little awkward to me to get started with dictation. I had the same feeling of awkwardness years ago when I would dictate letters and reports for transcription by humans. But with a little practice you get over that. The big advantage of getting over that awkwardness, is that you can generate text a lot faster than you can type thing.

One of the reasons that I have not used Dragon on a daily basis is the problem of the headset. Until now the headsets that I've used have always had a wire on them.  The wire gets in the way and it's awkward knocking around on the desk.

Recently I bought a wireless headset. It's easy. It just sits on my desk until I'm ready to put it on, and then I start dictating. No papers get knocked off my desk in the process, no wire gets tangled up in things when the headset is not in use.

Since everybody composes text, I recommend to all to give Dragon a try because I have found so useful over the years.

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Keywords: Continuous improvement, Dragon

Monday, May 7, 2012

You have a mission statement. Now what?

Having a mission statement does not necessarily have anything to do with what the organization actually does. Although a mission statement may be the result of management blood, sweat and tears, it means nothing until the folks in the organization start living by it. How do you get from here to there?

Exposure

Your crew needs to know that the mission is. It must be short enough to be memorable and it has to be repeated frequently. It would be nice if we learned things by being told once, but we don't. You know your times tables because of repetition, you know about McDonalds because of repetition and you'll need repetition for your crew to know what your mission statement is.

Understanding

Exposure can get your crew familiar with your mission. That doesn't mean they understand it. Understanding comes from using the idea. Edclick makes web-based data products for continuous improvement in education. That's our mission statement. Does the crew get it just because I say it? They get it better when we pay attention to the idea, when we work with it. When we challenge it and it has to defend itself. For example, when we discuss a possible new product idea, we have a perpetual question: how will this lead to continuous improvement in education?

Asking questions and discussing the answers gets us closer to understanding what the mission statement means. But we still aren't there.

Belief

Beyond understanding the mission, you want your crew to believe in it. You cannot create belief by decree or intimidation. It's going to take some convincing and may take some compromise. Convince your crew that you believe in the mission by making it a central feature in what you do. Have it be front-and-center and a touchpoint that you frequently return to to resolve questions of priorities and values.

Show that you're serious about your mission by making it central to discussions with the crew about how their value to the organization correlates to their contribution to the mission. Your mission should have real consequences on your organization's activities. Similarly, it should have real consequences to your crew.

Enthusiasm

Your organization is obviously at an advantage if everyone in it enthusiastically embraces the mission. How is that going to happen? First, by having a meaningful mission that all hands find worthwhile. Second, by making progress toward the serving the mission. That means not only doing the work but measuring your progress against the elements of your mission. Enthusiasm comes from making progress toward a worthy goal.

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Keywords: continuous improvement, mission

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Creativity and improvement

I was reading an interesting article today about how geniuses differ from the rest of us. It lists eight strategies for creativity that are common among geniuses. This one is particularly interesting to me:

GENIUSES PRODUCE. A distinguishing characteristic of genius is immense productivity. Thomas Edison held 1,093 patents, still the record. He guaranteed productivity by giving himself and his assistants idea quotas. His own personal quota was one minor invention every 10 days and a major invention every six months. Bach wrote a cantata every week, even when he was sick or exhausted. Mozart produced more than six hundred pieces of music. Einstein is best known for his paper on relativity, but he published 248 other papers. T. S. Elliot's numerous drafts of "The Waste Land" constitute a jumble of good and bad passages that eventually was turned into a masterpiece. In a study of 2,036 scientists throughout history, Dean Kean Simonton of the University of California, Davis found that the most respected produced not only great works, but also more "bad" ones. Out of their massive quantity of work came quality. Geniuses produce. Period.

Why should we make such a conscious effort to continuously improve? Doesn't that get in the way of actually getting our real work done? Well, it probably does get in the way of our routine work to an extent. But I would suggest that our real work is to get better and better. And the more improvements we make, the higher our chances for really significant change.

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Keywords: continuous improvement, creativity

Friday, April 27, 2012

Measuring the unmeasurable

Improvement implies more than change. It implies doing something better than it had been done before. But better implies measurement. What about those cases when you want to improve something that's unmeasurable?

Most things that are considered unmeasurable actually are measurable. In cases when something seems to be unmeasurable, it generally seems that way due to a misunderstanding.

Take mentoring as an example. Can we measure mentoring? Some might say no, but consider a few points.

• Is mentoring something you value? If so, it is worth measuring.
• Is there a way to judge the value of mentoring? Is there some detectable outcome? If not, why do you value it? If so, the very detection of the outcome is a form of measurement...a yes/no measurement.
• Does some mentoring result in better outcomes than other mentoring? If so, you can do better than yes/no measurement...your measurement can result in a ranked list of the effectiveness of mentoring events.
• Can you assign values to how much better one mentoring outcome is than another? If so, not only can mentoring measurements be ranked in order but they can be assigned a magnitude of the amount of value that came from each mentoring.

Each of the points above indicates a type of measurement. Often the barrier to measurement will disappear simply by clarifying the concept that you are trying to measure.

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Keywords: Continuous improvement, measurement

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

4 Capabilities of high-velocity organizations

A few organizations are able to improve much faster than others. They are sometimes called high-velocity organizations. How are they different?

1. Seeing problems as they occur
2. Swarming to solve problems as they occur
3. Spreading new knowledge
4. Leading by Developing capabilities 1, 2 and 3 throughout the organization

The opposite of seeing problems as they occur is to see them later or not at all. Teaching a unit then giving a test only to find out that the students didn't get it...that's not seeing problems as they occur.

The best time to solve a problem is when it's fresh. It's just like solving a crime. If you allow it to become a cold case, the evidence is gone, the witnesses are fuzzy, the perp has had time to disappear into the night.

One of the most neglected areas in improving education is spreading new knowledge. In many schools, new ideas are not spread. A discovery by one teacher must be independently rediscovered by others. Even worse, materials and lesson plans are jealously guarded. It wastes effort and inhibits the growth of the organization.

Adopting the characteristics of high-velocity organizations is no small thing. While each problem solved might be a small problem, the accumulation and dissemination can have a huge effect.

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Keywords: continuous improvement

Sunday, April 22, 2012

Improvement? I'm too busy for that!

A very smart guy made a statement to me very much like the one above just a couple of days ago. He didn't seem to notice the irony in what he said.

We get signals when a process is crying out for improvement. One signal is when we feel overwhelmed. Another is when things just don't come out like we expect them to. A third is when a job that should take an hour is taking two days. 

These are opportunities. These situations are ripe for improvement. This is not the time to say, I can't improve now, I'm just barely hanging on as it is. These are the times when you need most to improve.

Improvement is not a luxury to be put off until things are relaxed and easy. That time may never come...especially if you're overwhelmed and unwilling to improve!

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Keywords: Continuous improvement

Friday, April 20, 2012

Perfection and disappointment

One reason that we sometimes feel depressed or disappointed with our lives is because we have high expectations. It hasn't always been like that. For thousands of years religions have promised perfection in the afterlife while warning not to get your hopes up too high for this life on earth. But for the past few centuries life has been improving rapidly across the globe. It has tempted us to think that we might attain paradise on earth. If fact, many are so disappointed with the imperfections of life that they give up. Some turn to drugs. Some simply become depressed. Some seek a life of pleasure but then find it unfulfilling.

The problem is overly high ambitions. Even an expectation of perfection. And that attitude guarantees disappointment.

The better attitude is to believe that there is always room for improvement, no matter how good or bad your situation is. Parallel to that is the attitude that we should always be involved in the business of improvement. Improvement isn't an inconvenient distraction from life. It is the essence of life.

These are highly benefical attitudes. And fortunately, no matter what our circumstances, we are always free to choose our attitudes.

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Keywords: Continuous improvement, perfection

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Daily improvement time

I have found that a useful technique for continuous improvement is to take a little time each day to think about it. Have a little down time? Want a change of pace from your usual activities? Take a moment and ask yourself, what needs to be improved?

It's (for me) to identify areas that need improvement. In my daily improvement time I pick one and start working on how to make an improvement. The area needing improvement that I picked yesterday was transferring one set of files to multiple servers. I thought that surely that could be done more efficiently than how I was doing it.

In investigating possible solutions, I had an insight about how to smooth the transition we're planning for this summer for a change in server architecture. It's much more important than the issue I started with and I'm very pleased with having come up with a better solution to a more significant problem.

All because I had a little extra time and wanted a change of pace from my usual work.

I recently wrote about the "daily tweak". These two posts are obviously related. The daily tweak is the goal to make a change every day. Daily improvement time is figuring in how to come up with the tweak. It's a tweak on the daily tweak.

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Keywords: continuous improvement, tweak

Monday, April 16, 2012

Three remedies for the self-serving bias

We humans have a habit of taking more credit and less blame than we deserve. It's called the self-serving bias. Although it may make us feel better (which is no doubt why we all tend to do it), it is also the source of errors. When we allow ourselves to use the self-serving bias, we tend to fail to see needed improvements.

It is easy to fall into the self-serving biase when we assess our own performance subjectively. Subjective assessments of our performance allow us to easily believe that we're performing just fine, even when we're not performing well at all.

So, how can we overcome the tendency to overlook errors due to the self-serving bias?

1. Be aware of the self-serving bias.
2. Use objective measures. Be suspicious of subjective measures.
3. Look for opportunities to improve rather than confirmation of good performance.

The third remedy is the most important. Note that it isn't the same as saying that no matter how well you've done something, it's not good enough. That's just another subjective assessment! Instead, look for imperfections, waste and unexpected outcomes. These are specific signals that there are specific opportunities to improve...which you can then do.

The goal is not to be perfect, but to continue to get better.

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Keywords: continuous improvement, self-serving bias

Monday, April 2, 2012

8 ways to incorporate continuous improvement in knowledge work

What constitutes continuous improvement in knowledge work?

1. Continually root out all waste
   • Knowledge work that doesn't involve judgement or expertise
   • Use the five whys to uncover waste
   • Rotation among jobs to spread knowledge
   • Look for small forms of waste, not just big ones
   • Periodically review the structure and content of each job
   • Avoiding errors, especially big ones! When errors occur, find out why and take steps to avoid their recurrence.
   • Reduce uncertainty. Experiment.
2. Strive to make tacit knowledge explicit
   • Specify the work; simple checklists are often sufficient
   • Codify repeatable parts of the work
   • Use the checklists or specified work. It often helps to involve two people to enforce the use of checklists.
   • Use data about the benefits of improvements to get buy-in
3. Establish measurable goals
   • Make progress toward goals easily visible as with a dashboard
4. Specify how team members should communicate
   • What needs to be communicated
   • Resolve disagreements with facts
   • Explicit lists of errors and their descriptions. This helps differentiate errors from style preferences.
5. Use the scientific method to solve problems quickly
   • Ideally the person who created the problem should fix it
   • Solve problems where they occur to comprehend contextual information
   • Solve problems as soon as possible after they occur
6. Recognize that your processes are always a work in progress
   • Codify lessons learned
   • Keep looking for new ways to work
   • Lean approach doesn't apply to visionary work
7. Improve knowledge and skills
   • Continue to gain expertise with your tools rather than plateauing at a basic level
   • Continue to learn in your field
8. Have leaders blaze the trail
   • Management must maintain interest and involvement over the long term
   • Persistence is the key
   • Because it is difficult, it makes it difficult for competitors to replicate

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Keywords: Continuous improvement, waste

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Avoiding waste in education

One of the best ways to improve what you do is to avoid waste. But what constitutes waste in education?

Wasted degrees. When my wife graduated from college with her teaching degree in 1971, there was a glut of teachers in the market. It had to do in part with demographics. Baby Boomers were coming out of college in large Baby Boomer numbers but there were now fewer students in the K12 schools. Could the school districts and education schools see this demographic change coming? Of course. Did the ed schools warn students against becoming teachers? Nope. Was there waste? You bet! The majority of newly graduating teachers had to find employment somewhere other than education.

Wasted courses. I once took a graduate course that was of no value to me or anyone else in the class: abstract algebra. Abstract  algebra may be of value to mathematicians, I don't know. But it was a required course for grad students in computer science where I did my master's work. So here was an entire classroom full of us studying a course that had absolutely nothing to do with computing, programming, algorithms or anything else relevant to us. It was a waste of a lot of time for a lot of people. Years later I was invited back to that school to give a lecture. While I was with the head of the department I asked him why we were required to take abstract algebra. He said he didn't know. It made no sense to him.

Failed courses. When a student spends time in a course for a semester or a year and fails it, it is a dreadful waste of the student's time and the teacher's time too. How can this waste be avoided? The best approach is early diagnosis of a problem and intervention.

Poorly learned units. A common mode of teaching is to cover a unit of material then give a test at the end and move on to the next unit. But what if a student didn't learn it? Well, he gets a bad grade. He should have worked harder. That's a waste of time. There are few things more productive than giving formative assessments along the way and modifying the teaching based on their results. It makes little sense to plow forward if the students aren't getting it.

Reinventing lessons. There is a lot of repetition in teaching year to year. If you taught algebra one last year and are going to teach it this year, those two courses obviously are very similar. One of the most startling things to me when I work with schools who use our lesson planning product is that many teachers resist making lesson plans! What a waste of time reinventing a set of lesson year after year.

Repeating mistakes. One of the benefits of a set of well organized lesson plans is the opportunity to make improvements daily. Teach a class, then at the end of the day reflect on what went well and what needs work in the lesson plan. Fix it immediately while the memory is fresh in mind. Don't repeat your mistakes!

Working in isolation. Teachers sometimes feel isolated and alone in their classrooms. That's ridiculous! There are teachers throughout the country teaching exactly what you are teaching. There may be many teachers in your own school teaching exactly what you are teaching. Why not work together? And it goes beyond content. Whether you're being frustrated by problems of classroom management or getting through to a particular student, the same problems have been addressed countless times by other teachers. Don't go it alone.

Small scale inefficiencies. When you first saw the title Avoiding waste in education, you may have thought of such things as ways to save paper, ways to avoid having misbehaving students sitting in the office or ways to save some time through a particularly efficient method of passing out papers. These are examples of small-scale waste. They are very important because they rob students of time-on-task. It is worthwhile to identify them and root them out! Just don't miss the big picture.

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Keywords: continuous improvement, waste

Monday, March 26, 2012

Edison on improvement

Although the notion of continuous improvement wasn't to become popular until decades after his work, Thomas A. Edison showed that he lived by the basic concepts. Here are some of his quotes.

There is a better way -- find it.

Waste is worse than loss. The time is coming when every person who lays claim to ability will keep the question of waste before him constantly. The scope of thrift is limitless.

Restlessness is discontent and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure.

To have a great idea, have a lot of them.

Nearly every man who develops an idea works it up to the point where it looks impossible, and then he gets discouraged. That's not the place to become discouraged.

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.

Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won't work.

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Keywords: continuous improvement, Edison

Monday, March 19, 2012

The daily tweak

Can you improve something every day? Try it. I'm not talking about a revolutionary change, but just a tweak...but a persistent tweak, an improvement that you'll keep.

As I look over my desk, I see lots of opportunity for improvement. Papers scattered, Post-Its around, pens and USB drives scattered about.

Something else is a bit of a mess: time. I don't do a very good job of spreading long-term tasks over time. I would do better to make bits of progress along the way. David Allen's Getting Things Done is an approach that has a lot of appeal.

So, I've actually made a few tweaks today. I have a daily process list that pops up first thing every morning which I use to plan my day.

• Adjusted my daily process to include a step similar to the 43Folders in Getting Things Done. But instead of using folders, I just make entries on my online calendar (folders? paper? are you kidding?)
• Adjusted my daily process to include a daily tweak
• Realized that I wasn't actually doing the weekly review I have scheduled on my calendar every week, so I wrote a review process.

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Keywords: continuous improvement, tweak

Friday, March 16, 2012

Great expectations

In order to improve, we need to find the knowledge gaps. Knowledge gaps show themselves as surprises. When we're surprised, it is because we were expecting something else.

A surprise is a violated expectation. I expected X, I got Y, surprise! If we want to accelerate learning, make expectations more explicit.

A nice type of expectation is a measurement of outcome. For example, you teach your class to add single digit numbers and you expect that they will be able to pass a test adding single digit numbers. If they can't, surprise! The lesson needs improvement.

But what about less well-defined activities? What if you're going into a meeting to discuss a certain topic. Eventually the meeting will be over. Was it a success? The only way to know is to set your expectations before the meeting. What would a successful outcome look like? If you've set your expectations, there is a way to judge success or failure. If there is, there is some way to determine whether you understand what you're doing.

If your expectations are consistently off, you don't understand what you're doing. You have an opportunity to learn. And that's great because you have a specific opportunity to improve. Great expectations!

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Keywords: continuous improvement, surprises