What blocks improvement?
My focus this week has been to ask the question “What blocks improvement?”. The answers that I found most interesting were “I didn’t realise there was a problem.” and “I feel there is a problem but I don’t know where to focus my attention.” This set me pondering and eventually I had a bit of an “eureka” moment. It isn’t something that is present that creates this blindness – it is something that is missing. And the only way you can see what isn’t there is by comparison with when it is there – just like the game of “Spot the Difference”. When I compared what I saw with what I know is possible the thing I didn’t see was a fast-feedback loop. Hence the doodle. It appears that there are at least four dimensions to feedback – sign, magnitude, accuracy and timing. The speed of the feedback needs to be appropriate to the speed of the improvement; so if we want rapid improvement we need a fast-and-accurate feedback loop - a learning loop. A slow or inaccurate learning loop not only doesn’t work – it can actually make the problem worse. So, my take-home this week is to actively search for the learning loops and if I don’t see one then I have something to focus on improving.
“THE BAD NEWS DESK” – Although Bill Gates doesn’t often get positive press, I have to thank him in his book “Business @ the speed of light” for introducing this concept. As he quite rightly says, everyone is only to keen to feedback positive news but it is the Bad News, which focuses problem areas and achieves improvement.
I have found the hardest thing is not getting angry/upset when the bad news is given/delivered (some times very hard not to). If however you look at it from the very positive aspect of improvement, it is a fantastic option to get everyone to believe in and be willing to bring the bad news! If you don’t know about something you can’t do anything about it. It’s introduction and use has certainly worked for me in all the environments I have now used it.