Continuous Improvement - What you are unaware of controls you

In case you dont have time to listen:

A quote or two. Quality creates Growth. Growth creates Bloat. Quality lets you do more with what you've got—forces you to focus. Bloat might be technical depth, doing things that are not in focus, or in ways you didn't intend/design. Often, bloat is a symptom of never deciding whom to serve, how, and why that matters to those specific people who care.

Peter Drucker say "Results only happen outside the organisation; everything inside it is a cost."

 

Below is the full raw Descript Auto-transcription of this episode. raw = its not edited, and Descript isn't perfect.

Continuous improvement and what you're unaware of control you. Continuous improvement is co-work. It's collaborative in nature. Yet quite often, we have countless books for self-development, and I'm quite sure wherever you've been working throughout your life, you have individuals who perhaps talk languages like self-learning, taking the initiative to learn. 

And something happens. Usually, we have one or a few individuals in each team who are skyrocketing what they are able to achieve and what they're doing; they're embracing new technology, they're learning new processes, and they're adapting faster than most in a reorganisation.  Yet something happens with improvement when we have a team of, say, six+ people, when we have a team of 15 people, and you're trying to scale that, and I'm not talking Dunbar's numbers now.

And the personal thing, an empathy thing.  I'm talking about focusing on improvement as requiring a lot of vulnerability and trust.  Yet,  quite often, we don't talk about it. We talk about it as helping individuals to better things.  We're talking about retrospectives and thinking, figuring out how we as an organisation become better. 

it's important we actually think about this: what you're unaware of controls you here.  We can't talk about continuous improvement if we don't ask ourselves,  why are we here as a team? What's our promise to the organisation?  Here, I think it's vital that we embrace the fact that our hurry to get to say number three on a scale of ten is often what blocks us from actually getting to ten. 

Ten being able to scale up. Ten is being able to automate instead of require or hire,  speed things up,  and let people be free for vacations. In the long term, ten means serve better, not just because what happens when I say in our complex enough to get 3, it often blocks us from getting to 10.

What happens is, quite often, we have a KPI behind that we must get to.  And perhaps we're unwilling to "embrace reality", as Manager Tools discusses. So we're instead focused there on ONLY doing enough to reach "level 3", blindfolding us for what we know lies beyond. Because that's what we need to get done this month.  Sacrificing the future.  And we need to have empathy for that. 

Empathy for that other team who does it "to us un-intentionally".  You need to realise you're most likely doing it, too.  You're most likely also in a hurry to get to three.  That blocks you from scaling up and automating more.  And the better we become at talking about it, the higher we can grow. If we can talk about that quality creates growth,  which is a good thing,  because then you have resources to automate, then you have resources actually to figure out a better way to serve.

What is this team here for?  Who are our customers, who are, and what does the revenue look like?  And as that starts to grow, growth creates bloat and bloat is usually again, in the form of, okay, there's the journey of the urgent looking good in the KPI, in this specific thing that some of the team, especially if you're in a global organisation. 

People are mindful of their own KPIs, and they're not really seeing the whole business.  And that's why when we talk about continuous improvement,  we need to start with, why are we here?  On a great day, what is our healthy boundaries? I'm probably making that a block of three instead of ten for some teams. 

Then we need to talk about that with our manager and people up senior saying how can we  work on this together.  Then we need to go down again to look at our own continuous improvement saying why are we here again?  This is to who are we doing this for?  Probably, the continuous improvement will change. 

Because not everything matter.  If we dare to be very specific,  who our team is here for, if we dare to be very specific,  what our promise is for the work we're doing,  the better we can become at it, the faster we can become really good at it,  figuring out how can we automate more, how can we save resources so we can do this better long term. 

And another way of saying this  is focus. How can we focus on what actually matters and is worth improvement?  New shiny objects will always come along, so how can you stay committed to that?  And how can you be consistent with that? It's only with consistency that real improvement happens, especially if we go beyond ourselves and look at a team.

Notice it gets more complex when we're talking about getting a team to do continuous improvements. There are a lot of negotiations and painting a picture,  and I am looking for that enrollment because no one exactly aligns with any one individual.  So you probably need to work on your very local situation, um,  on how continuous improvement looks like. 

With trust, with transparency, with protecting your team. With this embracing that, reality is someone else isn't hired to get to three that will block you from getting to ten.  And how can you have empathy for your own situation with that? How can you have empathy with their situation with that? 

And then when you have worked on improving your local situation,  And the resistance and the hard work of getting that to work beyond one.  Now, looking at the global,  how can we work with continuous improvement globally?  It's very different from what it's for. It's a very different who it's for. 

And probably starts with empathy. Probably with yourself, with that, you have multiple accesses that will only partially align.  And when you do scale that up to 60 people, 100 people, perhaps thousands of people,  safety looks very different.  Especially if you're thinking of multicultural countries and stuff like that, you probably have one idea of what safety looks like.

You probably have one belief and trust in that, that won't be exactly the same globally.  Yet safety and trust is really important for continuous improvement.  And we need to embrace ourselves too, that,  when we say who it's for,  it's quite, quite often, specifically,  if you're a freelancer, choosing your clients. 

If you're an entrepreneur, choose your customer.  If you're,   an employee, choose your manager.  It's really, really important. And continuous improvement is really important for your next thing in life.  So,  and that also goes back to the core, be the one who lift other people, be the one who train other people, share what you learn, goes back to this three out of 10,  carve out some space to elevate the people around you.

It does not mean picking up a new shiny object because there will be a new tool, a new reorg, a new thing, and daring to commit and focus,  daring to be specific.  And also again,  in the line of continuous improvement, sometimes the challenge is, are we supposed to do this?  And how does that fit into the trajectory this team is on? 

How does this work with the other work we're doing?  And if we think we can fix our bubble and then ignore the rest,  the continuous improvement will fade,  will be less impactful.  So if you can start to embrace that it's actually very collaborative,  and other people see what you're unaware of,  there will be accesses that you will never see that are sort of coax grinding against yours,  the better you become at improving what matters for the people who actually care. 

But it starts with you,  thinking about who you want to serve, what problem is worth solving,  and thus, if it's worth solving, worth improving on.  And then talking to other people around you about that.  About how that changes as you grow.   Thanks for stopping by, my friend. Have a great one. 

 

[ Recorded with Audio-Technica AUD BPHS1 and Rodecaster Pro2, 2024-07-21 ]