If you have read any of my books, you’ll know that I like the phrase “what does good look like?“.
You can apply it lots of things.
For example, the other day I was invited into a continuous improvement meeting.
This is what I observed:
- No agenda.
- The team with no clear idea of who owned what improvement.
- A new continuous improvement manager, that wasn’t sure why they were there.
- An irate boss.
The meeting was stopped after a few minutes.
After a bit of probing, I found out that:
- There were no written action plans.
- The scopes of the improvements were unclear.
- This situation had been going on for months.
I’m sure that if you applied the “what does good look like?” question to this situation you wouldn’t draw this picture.
So, what looks good in this situation?
How about we flip some of the items?
- Clear ownership.
- Defined scopes and clarification of the deliverables.
- Written action plans.
- A time frame for completion of the project.
- An agenda for the improvement meeting.
(There are a ton of other strategies we could apply, but let’s work with this for the sake of the post!)
There are a number of ways of defining the experience you want. Flipping bad experiences, like the example above, is just one good way of doing it.
If you find yourself in continuous improvement meetings that don’t make much sense, reflect on this post and see what changes you can make the approach and format.
