The action: Every Friday, gather the team for a 15-minute improvement meeting.

The long form: In addition to the pulse meetings, the other useful part of an improvement rhythm is the weekly improvement meeting.

In this meeting you quickly prioritize and assign a small set (think one to five) of atomic improvement projects. You really want these initially to be doable on a time scale of a week or two, while you get into the habit of continuous improvement.

During the week, you will have built up a pile of notes containing problems identified in the daily pulse meetings. Pick a few, and consider rewording them if it makes them easier to solve.

You then assign one problem to a person on the team, who you will coach in understanding the problem and coming up with a countermeasure. A date for when they’ll have something to present is also useful.

An example could be “Linda is working on the problem ‘The wrenches are often misplaced, so we waste time looking for them’, and will present a countermeasure in two weeks time.”

(On a side note: The word countermeasures or often used in place of solutions, since every change you make to a system creates new, but hopefully smaller, problems. I guess it’s a Toyota-thing.)

We would place these on a board, so everyone can see what we are working on, what is in the backlog, and all the successful changes we already made.

Important: This is not the time and place for solving problems – that is done between the improvement meetings with your coaching (f40). To make the pulse- and improvement meetings work, it’s important to restrict their time to 5 and 15 minutes respectively.

Read more: Magnus Lord’s book is currently only in Swedish, but that’s not going to stop you, is it?