by Lee Fried, on 27 Apr 2012 01:31 pm
Uncategorized
50% Improvement Today
One of the key principles we teach is the belief that “50 percent improvement today is better than perfection sometime in the future.” While simple to say this principle is hard to put into practice. So often teams become stuck and fail to improve, because they are unable to come up with the perfect solution or the perfect process. We often tend to think of improvement as binary, either the problem can be solved or it cannot be solved. This prevents us from approaching improvement as a process and continuously learning from our experiments.
The same type of paralysis that often occurs at the team process level also occurs within the strategic planning process. Teams spend a lot of energy and time trying to assess which improvements will have the largest impact, opportunity costs, etc. Huge amount of energy are spent scoring, prioritizing, re-prioritizing strategies. While this type of assessment can be valuable it is often overdone. I believe most of the time it is more advantages to pick a focus area, set goals and then begin. It does not take long to begin to see how the system is connected and improvements can easily be extended from one area to the next.
Popularity: 54% [?]
on 27 Apr 2012 at 2:55 pm 1.Helga Ding said …
Your reflection got me to thinking about the careful balance (both Lean principles) of going slow to go fast (so we need to assure we do the appropriate root cause thinking and make sure we are addressing the problem that needs to be solved). Then, implement quickly, even if not perfect, and learn from that implementation. If you go too quickly before doing the right thinking, you could end up not even coming close to solving the problem. If you hesistate too long to move into implementation (it’s one reason we love our “pilots”), you’ll never learn if your solution gets you closer to your goals.
Thanks Lee, as always.
on 30 Apr 2012 at 1:46 pm 2.Lean Simulations said …
Just do it.
This slogan can be bad if you have no direction, but if you have a long term plan or goal, then start with the first step and the rest will follow, one step at a time.
on 03 May 2012 at 2:10 pm 3.MindEdge Monthly: Top Blog Picks…May 2012 « Quality At Work said …
[...] “50% Improvement Today” – Daily Kaizen [...]
on 21 May 2012 at 4:27 pm 4.Chris said …
A very thought provoking article. It is so easy to get caught up in the assessment of the opportunity rather then learning from the journey.
on 09 Oct 2012 at 9:10 pm 5.Too busy mopping to turn off the faucet. said …
[...] most of all, try to keep from limiting yourself to the obvious solution. I like this takeaway from Daily Kaizen: 50 percent improvement today is better than perfection sometime in the [...]