Category: Improving
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Think through the unintended negative downsides of what you reward.
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Sign up for Learning How to Learn. Just do it.
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Set up a system of apprenticeship at work.
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The key to increasing speed in a project is not to work faster, but to remove the waste of waiting between each step.
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Everyone needs an organizational system to track goals, priorities, and tasks.
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Any measure stops being useful if you make it into a target.
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Create a scoreboard that will tell you at a glance whether you are winning.
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Whenever possible, use visual aids to improve the work.
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Good craftspeople use good tools. So should your team.
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Neither you nor anyone else needs to have all the answers. What you do need is a willingness to experiment.
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Ask: “What is getting in the way of our doing work we are proud of?” Work towards eliminating complexity at work.
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Ask your team, “What is the smallest problem we have?” to get into a habit of improvement.
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Use a structured conversation, such as the A3-problem solving method, or Toyota Kata-questions, to increase your team’s ability to improve.
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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…
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The action: Start the day by gathering everyone around, and checking the pulse by asking how we are doing on our goals, and how we can help each other during the day. The long form: In the whirlwind of everyday activities it’s easy to go into what Dan Heath in Upstream refers to as tunneling…
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Don’t overstretch, but work towards a few important goals
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When agreeing on the most important goals, make sure you are also sharing the benefits with the team.
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There is no status quo. Organisations either get better or worse with time, so make a commitment to getting better.
First Forty 