The action: Ask your team, “What is the smallest problem we have?” to get into a habit of improvement.

The long-form: Yeah, yeah, it’s great to have important goals (f40). But too often these can be too ambitious to an organisation that isn’t used to improving things. Getting into a habit of fixing things is very much like exercise – you need to build the muscle over time.

So instead of going for a marathon-length run on your first day, first try the smallest possible improvement project you could possibly do. If it isn’t laughable, it isn’t small enough.

With the help of Magnus Lord, we worked on creating a culture of learning in a chain of veterinary practices. In one of them, we had an issue of consultations starting late. The first improvement project? Make sure all the clocks are running on time! It was a five-minute project, with little strategic importance to the company, but it helped instill a feeling that we don’t have to take our working conditions as given. If something is getting in the way of us doing a good job, we are allowed to shape our environment.

It also gave us the first victory. We eventually had a whiteboard where we could show all the ways we had successfully improved our jobs. The projects increased in complexity, but it would not have been possible without first fixing our smallest problems.

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

John Gall